The Third World War: August 1985

anywhere but in Europe. Its focal point could be nowhere but in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The critical point in the military action was therefore bound to be, at least as far as the battle on and over the land was concerned, in what was designated in NATO as the Central Region of Allied Command Europe.

What also seems beyond doubt is that the Soviet plan to penetrate the Northern Army Group, cross the Rhine in the Low Countries, and roll up AFCENT by an offensive thrust from north to south along the west bank of the Rhine, which would have taken CENTAG in the rear, came very close to success. It was well conceived and well prepared, with a not unreasonable assessment of the difficulties involved. This particular plan was an element in a general structure of contingency planning, any one part of which was valid in itself though none was likely to be implemented in isolation. It was the unexpectedly strong Western response to the Soviet intervention in Yugoslavia which pulled the chocks out, as it were, and set the plan for the invasion of the Central Region rolling down the slipway to the launch.

What might have happened in the long run if this plan had come off is quite incalculable. It can be said with complete confidence that in the shorter term it would have brought about the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany, and that the Atlantic Alliance would in consequence have lain in ruins. The possibility of a counter-offensive by the United States, in these circumstances, can hardly be conceived. The situation would have been beyond repair.

The bogey of an all-out attack on Allied Command Europe by forces of the Warsaw Pact, planned in total secrecy and carried out with complete surprise by forces already in place, with the aid of massive under-cover operations prepared with absolute security, was not the sort of thing to give sensible men sleepless nights in the years before the war — though it might not have been sensible wholly to disregard the possibility. Much more likely, Allied planners thought, was what actually happened: the implementation of well-prepared contingency plans, involving a high degree of preparation, as crises developing elsewhere showed signs of moving out of control.

Unlikely though it may have been, a surprise attack in the late seventies by in-place forces of the Warsaw Pact would have found Allied Command Europe so ill prepared that its early success could hardly have been in doubt, whether the French came in on the Allied side or not. The US Army in Europe had not yet fully recovered from the Vietnam experience. It was becoming accustomed to the absence of the draft but was already running into serious and unexpected difficulties over reserves as a result of ending it. Stocks which had been run down for the Israeli war were only slowly being replaced. The ‘Reforger’ system, by which formations would be flown in from the continental United States to marry up with equipment pre-stocked in the Federal Republic, though already showing great promise, had not yet been as fully developed as in the years to come.

The Bundeswehr was improving, but although its units were rated by the Russians as the best of the Allied bunch it was still only in moderate shape by the exacting standards of German professional soldiers, while the German Territorial Army was scarcely more than embryonic.

The British Army of the Rhine was again in the throes of reorganization, with the level of provision (and the state) of its equipment causing concern to its officers and with several battalions of its invaluable infantry still in Northern Ireland. The forces for defence in depth in NORTHAG, when the inevitable breakthrough occurred and there was no release of Allied nuclear weapons (which would almost certainly have been withheld), were wholly inadequate.

Belgian and Dutch forces were heavily — and dangerously — reliant on reservists with no more than short conscript training behind them, and were still reluctant (particularly in the case of the Dutch) to maintain any considerable strength in proximity to their forward battle stations in the Federal Republic. There was very little hope that in the event of a surprise attack Dutch forces of any real significance would have been able to reach their emergency positions before these were overrun.

The Allied air forces were still ahead of those of the Warsaw Pact in quality of equipment, though the gap was closing. They were also well ahead in the quality of their aircrew, but among the European Allies air forces had been ruinously run down. Air defence with surface weapons, even in Allied Command Europe, was nowhere strong. Some of the equipment was good. The British low-level Rapier, for instance, was outstanding. There were in 1977 only two Rapier regiments in BAOR, however, neither of which was armoured or even tactically mobile. The air defence of Great Britain, upon which so much would depend, was particularly weak. It was almost as rundown as the UK’s civil defences against air attack, whether by conventional weapons or nuclear.

Invasion from a standing start in the late seventies, if it had ever been tried, would almost certainly have brought the Russians to the Rhine in a very few days — unless NATO employed nuclear weapons. What would have happened then is anyone’s guess. A high probability would have been swift escalation into the strategic nuclear exchange which would very soon have rendered the land battle in Europe largely irrelevant.

Deliberate all-out attack with complete surprise from a standing start, it must be repeated, was always unlikely. The more probable way in which it was thought in the West that a war in Europe would be likely to break out was just the way it did. What happened to start it off in 1985 could have happened, in one way or another, much earlier.

If the crisis of 1985 had occurred in 1977, say, or even in 1978, it is, as we have seen, scarcely conceivable that the Soviet plan for an advance to the Rhine, the dismemberment of the Alliance and the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany could have failed given the state of preparedness of the Allies at that time.

What was done in the years between 1978 and 1984 was enough to prevent this. The tale of it has already been referred to in outline. It is told more fully, using Britain as a test case, in Appendices 1 and 3.

The advantages of the military structure formed to function in peacetime — a quite unique feature of the Atlantic Alliance — have become ever more abundantly clear. Without NATO as a framework the individual efforts of the Allies would have been of little account and much less effective in the aggregate. Within NATO the contributions of the Allies, though incompletely co-ordinated, added up to far more than the sum of the parts. In these years the United States came out of its post-Vietnam trance. Great Britain threw off some of the illusions which had flooded into the vacuum left by the disappearance of an empire. The Federal Republic ceased to be mesmerized by the success of its economic miracle and the allure of a welfare state. Even Belgium and Holland, though late and incompletely, began to show some awareness that the Soviet Union was already in a position to meet and master a real crisis and would welcome a showdown with the capitalist West, and sooner rather than later at that. Throughout NATO there was a growing tendency to face and accept defence responsibilities, nowhere more clearly shown than in a steady rise in readiness, an improvement in reinforcement capabilities and a striking advance in anti-tank and air defence.

The miscalculation over the possible participation of France was a major blunder on the Soviet Union’s part at the very outset. In the sphere of grand strategy the Soviet Union was soon to be in deeper water still. It was attempting to handle an almost worldwide problem of war command, with operations proceeding simultaneously from Bodo in Norway to Berbera in North-east Africa, from the Caribbean to the Caucasus. This was beyond the powers of the centralized system of control on which the regime depended. Only a degree of independence in command which was wholly foreign to it, and to which Soviet commanders themselves were completely unaccustomed, could have enabled peripheral commands to retain the initiative without which they were bound to fail.

At the tactical level, a very similar point applied. The Russians were attempting to apply a battle-fighting method which demanded a degree of independence in junior leaders which it had been a major interest of the Marxist-Leninist system to discourage.

The battle-fighting method itself was on the whole unremarkable. What was hailed in the West by some in the late seventies as a tactical revolution in the Red Army, the conversion from mass attack to manoeuvre, from the shock of frontal assault to the ‘deep thrust’ and the ‘daring raid’, was neither so novel nor so radical as was thought. What was being developed in Red Army tactical practice was the action of combined arms, co-ordinated and commanded at a lower level than was customary. This marked a shift of emphasis which showed up weaknesses none the less. The BMP, designed for the nuclear battlefield, was found not to be the best combat vehicle for the carriage of infantry supporting armour in a non-nuclear battle. It was in the process of being somewhat hesitantly replaced by a better vehicle, the MTLB, when war broke out. The problems of interrelating combat elements with different speeds and other characteristics remained unsolved.

So did the difficulties of combining many widely differing parts into a composite tactical whole in a fluid situation, where initiative, inventiveness and a bold independence of mind in junior leaders were what counted. The Red Army had made much over the years of the importance of free and lively debate among junior officers,