The Third World War: The Untold Story

and the Netherlands, though not yet in France, received early and violent attention on the very first day from long- range missiles launched from Soviet aircraft. Coastal airfields, especially those handling military transports, and the air traffic control centre at West Drayton near London were among early targets struck. The United Kingdom Air Defence (UKAD) Command, with its complex of warning systems, interceptor aircraft squadrons and gun and missile defences, was fully extended practically from the start. It was almost overwhelmed at first by the volume of attack upon defences that had never yet been brought to the test in this new type of war, in which computer response and missiles had replaced the searchlight and visually-aimed guns of earlier days.

Operations in the north, up as far as the Arctic Circle, opened at once on account of their relevance to trans-Atlantic reinforcement. Attacks on Atlantic ports soon followed, swift moments of appalling noise, leaving, in a silence broken only by the crackling sound of gathering fire, the twisted steel of harbour installations with little houses near the docks reduced to burning shells. As the Soviets gained airfields to the west, it was felt upon the French side too, with Brest and the Channel ports joining Glasgow, Bantry, Bristol and Cardiff on the list of towns hit.

It had taken the Soviets almost a full day to realize that, against their hopes and expectations, they had a belligerent opponent in the French Republic. Moscow had firmly believed that the French, pursuing as always the national self-interest with a single-mindedness unequalled anywhere, would find it more prudent to keep out. Yet for all the obstacles set in the way of Western defensive co-operation by de Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO, and for all the reliance the Soviet Union had placed upon some years of left-wing government in France, the French Republic abided most faithfully by its obligations under the Atlantic Treaty.

In spite of assurances broadcast worldwide from Moscow that France would remain immune from attack if it remained neutral, and that the punitive and prophylactic operation undertaken by the USSR against NATO would in that event go no further than the Rhine, II French Corps in Germany had already been quietly placed by the French Government under the full command of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) on the night of 3/4 August. Three further divisions and an army headquarters soon followed, with the French Tactical Air Force also placed under command for the support of French ground forces. French ports, railways, military installations and, above all, airfields and airspace were put at the disposal of the Western allies. The bombing by Soviet aircraft of Boulogne, Calais, Dieppe and then Brest, and of other ports and a number of airfields followed very soon afterwards.

The great weight of the Soviet ground and air attack was to be concentrated on the Central Region of Allied Command Europe (ACE), within which SACEUR, an American, was responsible for operations from the northern tip of Norway to the southeast corner of Turkey, and from the Caucasus in the East to the Pillars of Hercules at the gates of the Mediterranean in the West. The Central Region, under its German Commander-in-Chief (CINCENT), stretched from the southern edge of Schleswig-Holstein down to Switzerland, with Allied Forces Northern Europe (AFNORTH) on its left flank under a British general, and Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH) under an American admiral on its right. Behind ACE lay the area of responsibility of the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT), an American admiral operating from Norfolk in Virginia, while in between there was the newly-created Joint Allied Command Western Approaches (JACWA).

Gotterddmmerung was to be staged in Germany. But wars are made by people; it is a truism hardly worth repeating that without people there would be no wars. What is more, it is people who fight and die in them, who injure and destroy other people in them, who suffer from them, and yet who seem to be so far unable to prevent their occurrence as to provoke quite intelligent men and women to the infantile conclusion that if only you could take away all the weapons no fighting would be possible. Because reflection upon people, and above all upon the people who get themselves caught up in wars, must lie at the heart and centre of all reflection upon war and peace, we turn now from contemplation of the scene upon which this stupendous tragedy was about to be played to make the acquaintance of one minor actor in it, someone whose whole life up to its very end had become totally dominated by it, whose conscious being was to be completely absorbed in it, whose capabilities and energy were to be applied exclusively to the discharge of his own part in it, and who was to have no influence whatsoever on its outcome.

Chapter 2: Andrei Nekrassov

Andrei Nekrassov was born on 13 August 1961 in Rostov on Don into a military family. His father had been an officer in the Red Army but ill health had compelled his retirement from military service and he now lived, a widower, quietly at home in Rostov. Andrei’s mother had died in his youth and his father had never married again. From childhood both Andrei and his elder brother had dreamed of becoming officers too. In 1976 the elder brother entered the Ryazan Air Force Academy and four years later became a paratroop officer in 105 Guards Airborne Division, quite soon to find himself in Afghanistan.

When in 1978 Andrei left school, where he had shown some promise in mathematics but an even greater inclination to literary and philosophic studies, he too entered a military academy, the Armed Forces Command Academy in Omsk.

He was not by nature a convivial or even a gregarious young man. He was in fact a little shy and did not make friends easily. Happily, he found a contemporary in his own intake to the Academy who was of much the same disposition as himself, and between this young man, Dimitri Vassilievitch Makarov, the only child of a history lecturer in the Lomonossov University in Moscow, and Andrei Nekrassov there developed, in its quiet way, a deep and enduring friendship.

It was just before he left the Academy in Omsk, after four years, that Andrei learned of the death of his brother in Afghanistan, in an action, of which he had no details, against the Mujaheddin. He grieved for the loss of his brother but he was particularly sad for his father, whom he now so rarely saw. In a family with no mother, the three of them, the father and two sons, had been very close. His father would feel still lonelier now.

On graduating from the Academy in 1982 Andrei was promoted to the rank of officer and posted by the Ministry of Defence to the Southern Group of Forces in Hungary, where he was given command of a platoon in the motor rifle regiment of 5 Tank Division. Soviet forces abroad were normally in Category One, at operational strength, including the officers. Young officers beginning their service abroad did so at the lowest level. Most of Andrei’s fellow cadets who had received postings within the Soviet Union were given command, not of platoons but of companies, immediately after graduating from the Academy. By sheer good luck Dimitri too had been sent to 5 Tank Division and was commanding a platoon in another company of the same motor rifle regiment.

In 1984 Nekrassov was transferred to the Belorussian Military District, where he took over a motor rifle company in 197 Motor Rifle Division of 28 Army. All divisions in 28 Army belonged to the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, although in peacetime they were largely stationed in Belorussia. Together with its normal combat training, 28 Army was in constant practice for a swift move into East Germany, where, even in peacetime, its mobilization stores and much of its heavy equipment were located.

In Hungary Andrei Nekrassov had had a platoon of thirty-two men. In Belorussia he was given command of a company comprising three platoons, but with no more than thirty men in all. Like most other such companies, his was thinly manned, with only a cadre of indispensable specialists: junior commanders, drivers of BMP infantry combat vehicles, and heavy weapons operators. The ‘cannon fodder’ — submachine gunners, machine-gunners, grenade throwers and the like — joined the company only on mobilization. The standard of training of these reservist soldiers was abysmally low but no one seemed to mind. After all, there was an almost inexhaustible supply of them.

In June 1985 extensive training exercises began in Belorussia. Under the guise of these, as became clear later, the Red Army was partially mobilized and divisions were reinforced to their regular strength. The reservists came from Moslem republics — Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kirghiz. After two months of refresher weapon training (the men had by now almost forgotten how to handle weapons), sub-units had been formed. Even when this training programme had long been completed, no order to release the reservists came through. On the contrary, the instructions were to continue with the training.

No. R341266 Senior Lieutenant Nekrassov, 001, was beginning to get worried. As one of the regiment’s best