The Third World War: The Untold Story

deployed into battle order, engaging the British battle groups. Spread out behind the tank regiment came the heavy motor rifle regiment. First the tank battalion of the regiment, then the first of its three motor rifle battalions. The second came up on the left, the third on the right. Each battalion was formed into identical columns of companies: the first company moved straight ahead; the second, at great speed, off to the left; the third to the right. The rumble and clash of iron filled the smoke-laden air. The armoured fighting vehicles spread out from their columns into battle formation as the tank guns hammered out their deafening drumbeat. This dreadful clanging noise, this terror and confusion, this necessity to do what you had to do when everything happening around was driving you away from it, was a battle.

Nekrassov scanned around him from the command BMP through his periscope, swinging it from side to side. Smoke drifted everywhere. Explosions ploughed up the open ground close by. Red flames leaped and licked over the armour of a T-72 tank not twenty metres distant. Beyond was another with its tracks broken, perhaps by one of the anti-tank mines the enemy dropped by air. Where the hell were those Chieftains? The Soviet tanks and BMP filled the landscape like an avalanche. The enemy was somewhere at hand but not to be seen. The British tanks were there all right, firing not directly from the front but from the flank or from far back, in well-chosen positions behind low crests in undulating ground.

Now the enemy’s anti-tank helicopter gunships were coming in, with their deadly guided weapons. These would zoom down, attacking the ZSU-23 air defence guns and missile launchers, and then withdraw to open a way into the defence for the fixed-wing American A-10 Thunderbolts, storming in with tremendous weapon power, their swift and thunderous onslaught on tanks and BTR followed up again by the helicopter anti-tank gunships. Armoured vehicles in some numbers, whether tanks or BTR, fell victim to these attacks but attacking aircraft suffered too. No sortie withdrew without explosion in the air and flaming wreckage left on the ground. Nekrassov had not expected this. He had been told that the American tank destroying aircraft would be operating further south. They were wrong!

The BMP was fast and clung close to the ground. It was a difficult target for a tank gun, or a ground-based anti-tank guided weapon (ATGW), but as Nekrassov watched, one of them took a direct hit from a powerful shell. All that was left of the BMP seemed to be pieces of armour flying through a cloud of rubbish like rags in the wind. Almost certainly that was a Challenger gun. Mercifully there were said to be relatively few in the British Army. Nekrassov would have welcomed some of these on his own side, stronger though it was.

By mid-afternoon on 7 August, 197 Motor Rifle Division had pushed 6 kilometres into the enemy defences. But that was all. The division had ground to a halt. In Nekrassov’s company only six of the original ten BMP remained. His own was still on the road, with Boris Ivanienko as its careful, steady driver. When the tanks had gone as far as they could, the infantry threw themselves forward under cover of tank fire, followed up by their BMP. One difficulty emerged quite early: the reserve riflemen had not been well enough trained to conserve their ammunition. As they moved they were firing off their automatic weapons without restraint. The 120 rounds each carried could not last very long. Without ammunition they took cover where they could. The enemy’s anti-tank defences were still intact. Soviet tanks were halted.

Nekrassov lay in the grass, gnawing his fist. If there were a counter-attack now, the entire regiment, without ammunition for its riflemen, would probably be wiped out. But there was no sign of a counter-attack. The enemy had clearly had a hard time too.

Two East German and two Soviet motor rifle divisions had now been taking turns pounding at one British division for several days. There would have been severe losses on the enemy’s side, but not as many as we have had, thought Nekrassov as he looked around at his own company. Only twenty-three dismounted men were left, plus six remaining BMP with their crews. But what was happening? The troops on the ground had gradually begun to drift away, slowly crawling to the rear.

“Back! Back!” shouted Senior Lieutenant Nekrassov. It was no use. They did not understand him. These were all Uzbeks or Kirghiz, with scarcely a word of Russian between them. Nekrassov had taught them what he could. They had all learnt the command “Advance”. Not “Withdraw”, naturally; there was no such order. They might misunderstand what he was saying now, and go on making for the rear instead of back to the battle. Those heavy multiple rocket launchers on the other side were enormously destructive and very frightening, that was sure. But this had to be stopped.

“Back to where you came from,” shouted Nekrassov, “not to the rear. The KGB will shoot you!”

The soldiers who were creeping back stopped and looked towards their commander. Still keeping close to the ground, he pointed to where No. 2 Company, also drifting back, was coming under the machine-gun fire of the KGB barrage battalion, whose function at the rear was to ensure, by any means, that the forward momentum of their own troops was maintained. The Uzbeks understood and took cover. They turned and grinned at Nekrassov. Their expression clearly said: “Thanks, Sir! You told us just in time!” But only their eyes said this. They had never been taught enough to be able to say it in Russian.

It was late evening before the ammunition arrived. In some ways its arrival was welcome, in some ways not. It is impossible to manage without ammunition in a war, that’s certain, but now they’d be sent in to attack again. Who would survive this time?

Along with the ammunition came meagre rations for lunch and supper rolled into one as well as the next morning’s breakfast. There was vodka for 105 men, very little bread and only ten jars of meat paste. Nekrassov cursed the supply services in a rage.

“Comrade Senior Lieutenant,” explained the stout Sergeant Major, Astap Beda, doing his best to calm things down, “the regimental doctor says it’s dangerous to eat a lot during a battle. What if you are wounded, and have to be operated on with a full stomach?”

“That man’s a lickspittle liar!” burst out Nekrassov. “They’ve no bread, they can’t feed the troops, so with the help of the medics they dream up bogus scientific theories.” Then he stopped himself.”

The Warsaw Pact offensive opened with considerable advantage to the attack. The ratio of forces gave them a general superiority over their opponents of rather better than three to one in ground troops, with an even more marked numerical advantage in tanks and tube artillery, though with no great advantage in quality. Indeed the latest generation of NATO tanks, the US M-1 Abrams, the German Leopard II and the British Challenger, which represented an improvement even on the formidable Chieftain (though this still formed the core of the British tank fleet) were every bit as good as the T-72s which constituted the main Soviet tank armament, and even had the edge on the T- 80s, of which some but not very many were already in service with Soviet troops in 1985. Allied ATGW were fully as efficient as those of their opponents, though their air defence weaponry was less so.

In their tactical air forces, as in target acquisition and battlefield control techniques, the Western allies had had to accept disappointment in the pre-war years, when budgetary restrictions deprived them of much needed innovations. They had largely had to make do with what there was, but with a deliberate attempt to do so more effectively, exploiting to the full such improvements as tight budgets permitted.

The Warsaw Pact side also enjoyed the advantage on 4 August 1985 of having had, roughly speaking, about two weeks’ more time in which to mobilize than NATO.

A further advantage to the offensive lay in the initiative over nuclear and chemical weapons. It was clear that biological weapons would not be used, but operations on the Western side had to be conducted in initial uncertainty over the other two. This meant accepting the penalty of operating under nuclear and chemical precautions with a degradation of efficiency which in some situations could be something like 50 per cent.

The greatest advantage of all to the offensive, however, lay in the choice of time and place for attack, which put in the attackers’ hands the power to concentrate a high superiority of force almost where they wished.

In fact, topography exercised so compulsive an influence on choice of thrust line that Soviet hands were not as free as in theory they should have been, while Allied formations were fighting on ground they now knew very well indeed, which the enemy did not. None the less the speedy identification of main thrusts, so that defences and counter-offensive means could be moved to meet mounting threats in good time, formed one of the main preoccupations of Allied corps and divisional commanders.

A message that came out from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to the world at large