At JACWA headquarters the operations staff were looking disconsolately at their meagre forces for attacking the enemy group. The specialized anti-shipping Buccaneers that had survived a raid on Murmansk the day before were being held at Bodo, Norway, to guard against Soviet naval incursions along that coast and they could muster only two or three aircraft from the UK. These would need in-flight fuelling and a fighter escort against the carrier. It could hardly be called a balanced force. But help came unexpectedly in the shape of fourteen Marineflieger (Federal German Naval Air Force) Tornados which arrived at Kinloss air base in Scotland as the planners were puzzling over the problem. This force, thanks to the decisiveness of its commander, Captain Manfred Steinhof, had got away from Nordholz in Schleswig-Holstein under the very noses of the advancing Soviets.
By 0900 hours, and after the French Ministry of Defence had got Irish agreement for the Marineflieger aircraft to refuel at Shannon despite the previous day’s damage, eight of the Tornados landed and refuelled. They were in the air again in half an hour to join their fighter escort of RAF Tornados backed up by a VC-10 tanker. A United States Navy Orion had by then taken over the shadowing of the Kiev force on its radar and it homed the Tornados in for the attack. The carrier was holed with her steering disabled and one of her escorts badly damaged as the force withdrew and the submarine Splendid arrived on the scene to despatch the stricken ships. Three Tornados were lost, one to a Forger and the others to missiles from the escorts. Manfred Steinhof’s aircraft ran out of fuel short of the Irish coast but he and his navigator were picked up by a fishing boat. The Third World War had broken out thirty-seven hours earlier, and this was just one action in the great tide of war that was engulfing Europe.
WAR
Chapter 11: The Central Front
The contingency plan formulated by the Defence Council of the Politburo for the defence of the Soviet Union and its socialist allies against the aggressive designs of Western capitalism had two supreme aims: to cause the collapse of the Atlantic Alliance and to bring about the neutralization of neo-Nazi Germany. The second would lead to the first. The dismantling of the Federal Republic must, therefore, receive primary and very close attention.
To the Chief of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal P. K. Ogurtsov, an old cavalry soldier brought up in his profession in the 1930s to the use, incredible though it sounds today, of the sword as a weapon from the back of a horse (as, incidentally, was the main author of this book), the analogy was simple. Federal Germany was the point of the sword presented at the enemy; the outstretched right arm (‘at cavalry, engage — point!’) was Allied Command Europe; the hilt, which would come up against the victim’s body with extreme violence once the point was through, was NATO; the rider on the horse’s back, swinging forward with the thrusting, outstretched sword, planning, placing and timing the thrust, was the United States; the galloping horse giving the chief strength and impetus to the hilt, which, directed by the rider’s swinging body and extended arm, would hammer the pierced enemy out of his saddle, was Western capitalism. Reflecting by the stove in his dacha, the vodka bottle handy, the Marshal always admired the aptness of his analogy, only regretting that no one understood it any more. What had once been cavalry, riding horses and wielding l’arme blanche, had been suffocating in stinking tanks for nearly half a century.
The destruction of Federal Germany would mean the collapse of the Atlantic Alliance, the total demoralization of Europe, the withdrawal of the USA across the sea and swiftly widening opportunities for the spread of socialism throughout the world. The importance of the FRG was such, however, that an attack upon it would be no less than a total attack on NATO and would be resisted as such. It would have to be planned accordingly.
The initial assault had to be massive. To carry out the intentions of the Defence Council, ten fronts would be activated, two in the GDR, one each in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the far north, all in the front line, with follow-up fronts in the Leningrad Military District, in Poland and in the Ukraine, while in Belorussia and the Ukraine there would be also two groups of tank armies comprising three tank armies each, making six tank armies to exploit success in the centre, or to be used otherwise as circumstances dictated. The initial assault at dawn on 4 August, following action in space to restrict surveillance, undercover operations to frustrate command and support, deep air bombardment in Europe to interdict forward movement of war material and reserves, and action at sea to begin the interruption of maritime reinforcement, would open with the utmost violence along the whole Warsaw Pact-NATO interface, from Norway to Turkey.
Since the Central Region of Allied Command Europe (ACE), against which three fronts threatened, with a fourth standing by in Poland, was to be the focal point of this immense operation, it is upon the Central Front that we now concentrate. In our earlier book, The Third World War: August 1985, published in the spring of 1987, we described at length and in some detail the course of the main operation in this theatre and other accounts have appeared in other places. We do not intend here to recapitulate all that has been written. It is upon more personal aspects of these events that we shall focus instead, sometimes at very close range.
No plans for a major land offensive in modern war can ever be followed for very long after the offensive opens. The plans are made as part of a long-term concept. They embrace the object of the operations as a whole; the dispositions and movements of the enemy as they are known at the time; the probable reactions of the enemy’s commanders; and, perhaps most important of all, the estimate of what will be necessary for logistic support. Preparations for this demand forethought and imagination. They must be made far in advance and have to cover a period much longer than that during which the original operational plan of attack can continue to be followed. The operational plan may at any time have to be radically altered in a matter of days, or even hours, as commanders respond to the requirements of a developing situation. Logistic support, involving the movement and positioning of huge tonnages of material of all kinds, from bridging equipment to missile and gun ammunition, from fuel and food to medical supplies, cannot be as easily adjusted as the fighting formations can be moved around the battlefields.
Soviet logistic planning was on the whole sound. It recognized that some unforeseen movement of divisions, or even armies, would be forced upon the High Command as the action developed, and made preparations accordingly. Notwithstanding the rigidity of much of Soviet planning, the movement of formations, as the flow of the battle dictated it, was carried out on the whole successfully in spite of Allied air interdiction, and the logistics proved generally adequate.
One formation directly affected by regrouping, as the pattern of the battle changed, was 197 Motor Rifle Division. It had come into the forward area as part of 28 Army, whose headquarters had been located in Belorussia in peacetime but whose main fighting strength and equipment was always held in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG). The outbreak of hostilities on 4 August found 28 Army to the south-east of 1 Guards Tank Army which had just moved forward westwards from near Dresden. On 5 August, 197 Division was transferred from 28 Army to come under command of 8 Guards Army, operating west of Leipzig, involving a move for the division in a north-westerly direction of about 100 kilometres. This was almost completed on the night of 5/6 August, relatively little hindered by the movement westwards of rear echelons of 1 Guards Tank Army, now heavily engaged further forward. To keep routes open for 197 required some radical measures on the part of KGB troops none the less. It was fortunate that the traffic blocks which sometimes took an hour or more to clear received no attention from NATO air forces. The movement of 197 was completed early on the night 6/7 August, the division being due to move forward into the battle on the morning of the following day, 7 August.