The Third World War: The Untold Story

was always stressed, in practice the Party’s organization, as represented by the Zampolit (the commander’s deputy for political affairs) was concerned not only with politico-ideological questions, but also with purely military and even technical matters.

The training load for the officers in a Soviet warship was heavy. Most of the enlisted men were conscripts and served for thirty-six months. The training was competitive, in theory. But it was not uncommon for commanding officers to exclude from various drills those officers and enlisted men whose performance might bring down the ship’s score. A surprisingly large proportion of the Soviet warships’ time was spent in harbour too. The standard of combat readiness and weapon-training was not invariably as high as the smartness of the ships might lead one to expect.

To sum up this section, in terms of quality the Soviet Navy was, in itself, a formidable force, but it was dependent upon the proximity of bases — both naval and air — to be capable of matching the US and Allied fleets. Indeed, the outcome of a conflict waged near the Soviet home bases would have been difficult to predict. Fortunately for the Western allies this one was waged far from Soviet home bases.

Admiral Maybury then referred to the quality of the Soviet strategic nuclear ballistic missile force. As would no doubt be recalled, the earlier types of Soviet SSBN were distinctly inferior to the Polaris and Poseidon boats of the US Navy. But by 1985 the Soviet SSBN force was mainly composed of the Delta class, armed with missiles having a range of over 4,000 miles. On patrol in the Barents Sea, or the Sea of Okhotsk, these submarines could range on targets over the entire United States, safe from any counter-measures. Indeed, neither the US nor the Soviet navies were capable of countering their opponent’s SSBN, which retained, accordingly, their unique character as strategic retaliatory systems. Both the British and the French SSBN constituted, in spite of much smaller numbers, formidable second- strike forces. These, too, the Soviets could not counter. They could not ignore them either.

Before considering what is now known of the wartime Soviet deployments, it is as well to look at geography, and its bearing upon the operational concept on which the deployments were based. Geo-politics — ideas of ‘heartland’, ‘rimland’, ‘world ocean’, and so on — are interesting but probably of little practical value in formulating policies. The distribution of usable mineral resources may well determine the political map of the world in the future. But there can be no doubt of the underlying continuity of Russian foreign policy aims.

Tsar Peter the Great in 1725, shortly after his annexation of five Persian provinces and the city of Baku, and just before he died, enjoined his successors thus:

I strongly believe that the State of Russia will be able to take the whole of Europe under its sovereignty… you must always expand towards the Baltic and the Black Sea. You must try to approach Istanbul and India as far forward as possible. You must seek to dominate the Black Sea and be the owner of the Baltic. These actions are most important in order to achieve our future aims. You must also do your best to ensure the collapse of Persia as soon as possible and envisage opening a route through the Persian Gulf.[20]

In 1985 Peter the Great, the mystical-absolutist, might have conceded, had he been aware of events, that the dialectical-materialist usurpers in the Kremlin were not doing so badly. That is, until the fateful day of 4 August 1985, when the Soviet armies were launched into the Federal Republic of Germany. Tsar Peter would have been appalled at the disposition on that date of the Soviet Navy. With the most powerful of its fleets based in the remote areas of Murmansk and Kamchatka and the other two main fleets bottled up, one in the Baltic and the other in the Black Sea, how could Soviet naval power be brought effectively to bear in support of a grand design? Surely the decisive surge westward should not have been undertaken until a combination of circumstance, diplomacy and force had delivered into Soviet hands control of the exits from both the Baltic and the Black Sea?

Great emphasis had been placed upon the application of three principles in order to achieve the military aim of the Warsaw Pact, which was the destruction of the armed forces of NATO and its associates. These principles were: surprise, co-ordination of all arms, and concentration of force. Plans had been in existence, constantly updated, ever since Soviet military power had grown sufficient in relation to NATO to confer upon Soviet leaders the option of using it, if favourable circumstances should arise. It was not necessary in the Soviet Navy to risk compromising the contingency plans by any distribution below fleet commander level, and even then the directive was related to a D-day that remained undesignated until D -5. This ensured that no change in the pattern of Soviet naval activities should give NATO early warning of possible attack. On the other hand, every Soviet warship that proceeded outside local areas had to be fully stored for war, and peacetime deployments must not take major units more than five days’ steaming from war stations. Reconnaissance, surveillance and operational intelligence material had to be provided sufficient to support initial war deployments without augmentation, which might reveal unusual activity. Operational command and control of all warships, merchant ships and fishing fleets outside local areas would be assumed on D -1 by the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy in Moscow, where the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief, as Chief of the Main Naval Staff, was ready to assume the control of operations worldwide.

It seems that the NATO estimate of the main missions of the Soviet Navy in the event of war was not far out. They were: to maintain at instant readiness the SSBN strategic nuclear retaliatory force, and to ensure its security from any counter-measures that might be brought to bear against it; to counter, as far as practicable, the SSBN forces of the USA, Great Britain and France; to destroy or neutralize US carrier air groups, and other major warships; to support the army, both directly by fire power and indirectly by transportation and supply, and by interdiction of enemy military shipping; to interrupt all movement by sea which directly supported the enemy combat capability; and to carry out reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence missions as required in support of the foregoing missions.

From Soviet records it appears that the following force dispositions had been made in order to carry out the requirements of the naval contingency plan. At any moment during the last week of July 1985 there were eight SSBN, each with sixteen or twenty missiles, on patrol in the Barents Sea and five in the Sea of Okhotsk. From these locations, targets anywhere in the continental USA could be reached. In order to protect the SSBN from the unwelcome attentions of potentially hostile ‘intruders’, the Soviets used diesel-electric ASW patrol submarines, exploiting the acoustic advantage they enjoyed, when running on their electric motors, over the nuclear-powered opposition. There were, of course, shore-based ASW aircraft supporting the SSBN operations, and there was also the input from a comprehensive operational intelligence network.

The Soviet Union had come to the conclusion that it was not feasible to counter, completely or directly, the opposing SSBN forces of the USA, Great Britain and France. A certain amount could be done, however, to limit the damage to the Soviet Union which a retaliatory strike by SSBN could cause. The only warships earmarked for this purpose were some diesel-electric submarines — six in the Northern Fleet, and four in the Pacific Fleet — whose task would be to lay mines off the SSBN bases. Certain other counter-measures which the Soviets took were not specifically naval, and need not concern us here. They were not in any case very effective.

It is as well to recall the US/NATO force deployment upon which the Soviet Union had to base its plans — and as has been remarked earlier, the Western powers did not always provide themselves with a valid ‘Moscow view’. By 1985 the US Navy was well into the service life extension programme (SLEP) for its carrier force. This would add fifteen years to the normal thirty-year life of these warships. It was designed to enable the US Navy to have at least twelve carriers in commission for the remainder of the present century. By August 1985 the USS Saratoga and Forrestal had been through the SLEP, and were ‘good as new’; and the USS Independence had been taken in hand by the Philadelphia Navy Yard — that may have seemed tough on the Virginians, but at least Newport News was given the Carl Vinson, CVN-70, to build!

In a well-publicized comment, around 1981, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, said that he was ‘… trying to meet a three-ocean requirement with a one-and-a-half-ocean navy’. It has to be accepted that, over a period of years, it takes three carriers in commission to keep one up front. Hence, in mid-1985 there were permanently on station a one-carrier battle group in the Mediterranean, a one- and occasionally two-carrier battle group in the Indian Ocean and a one- and occasionally two-carrier battle group in the Western Pacific.

None was permanently on station in the Atlantic: a Carrier Battle Group Atlantic would be formed from the forces training in home waters prior to deployment for war. Each of the carriers had an air group of about eighty- five aircraft — fighters, strike aircraft, ASW aircraft, both fixed and rotary wing, and one or two aircraft specially