The Cold War: A Military History

WHEN THE GERMAN surrender became official at midnight on 8 May 1945, continental Europe was in ruins. The Allied armies halted where they were and there was a limited amount of celebration, but attention rapidly switched to more pressing problems. The USA and the UK needed to send troops to the Far East for the final phase of the Japanese war, while concurrently reducing their armed forces and starting to return conscripts to civilian life. The Soviet Union needed to recover from the devastation of the war and to ensure that such an attack would never again be possible. Of the other continental European powers, the only one of contemporary significance was France, which was anxious to assert its right to take its place alongside the three major Allies, but also had a pressing need to re-establish the French state and to reassert its control over its former colonial territories.

Meanwhile, all four tried to sort out the problems of a defeated Germany: to feed the population, to restart industry, to round up prisoners of war, to try war criminals, to carry out the denazification process and to enable the people to return to some sort of normality. One of the agreements at the 1945 Potsdam Conference was that machinery and industrial equipment would be exacted as reparations, and, since most industrial facilities were in the Western zones of occupation and most agriculture in the Soviet zone, the Soviets would receive a proportion of the machinery in exchange for food to help feed the population in the Western zones. Problems then arose owing to the failure of the Soviets to supply the food (which had to be made up by shipments from the UK and the USA), coupled with their insistence on obtaining every piece of machinery they had been offered. In May 1946 the Western Allies refused to send any further reparations to the East. The Soviets objected strongly to this, and started to use their veto to block progress in the Allied Control Council, where the four Allied commanders-in-chief or their representatives met. These first significant post-war disagreements were, with hindsight, indicators of the Cold War that was to come.

In global terms, the war had weakened all the western European countries, eliminated Germany as a European power, and transformed the USSR into a world power. The USA, however, had become the arbiter of Western destinies, having totally displaced the UK as the most powerful non-Communist nation. Among the western European nations, however, the UK, even though it was virtually bankrupt, remained militarily the most powerful nation, primarily because of its extensive empire and the large size of its military forces. There was also the moral debt, relevant in the immediate post-war years, which Britain was owed by other countries of Europe for which it had provided a bastion of freedom and democracy – and in many cases a base for governments-in-exile and armed forces – during six tumultuous years.

In eastern Europe the Soviet Union was all-powerful. It had the largest armed forces (by a huge margin), and exerted a rigid control over the lands it occupied. In addition, it had considerable influence in the West. There were, of course, the Communist parties, which exerted a major influence in countries such as Italy and France, but, of greater importance, many non-Communists admired the performance of the Russian people in the recent war, praised their powers of resistance, especially at places like Stalingrad, and sympathized with their huge losses and undoubted suffering.

During the course of the war the Soviet Union had pushed its borders westward, so that by 1945 Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, eastern Poland, Ruthenia, Bukovina and Bessarabia had all become integral parts of the Communist state. In addition, the Soviet Union had total control over East Germany, both by right of conquest and by inter-Allied agreement. But all this seemed to be insufficient, and in a speech on 9 February 1946 the Soviet leader Josef Stalin outlined a new Five-Year Plan, which gave absolute priority to rearmament, so that the Soviet Union could defend itself against what he termed ‘encroachment and threat’.

The implementation of this policy was clear for all to see as the Soviet Union brought one east-European country after another under its domination as ‘satellites’: Albania (1946); Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania (1947); and Czechoslovakia (1948). Even Tito’s Yugoslavia, while not a ‘satellite’, appeared at first to be under Soviet domination. The atmosphere of the times was well described by the former British prime minister Winston Churchill, who, in a landmark speech to students at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, took the opportunity to warn the world of the ‘iron curtain’ which was descending over eastern Europe.

Undoubtedly, mistakes and misunderstandings were made between East and West, stemming, at least in part, from a difficulty that was to continue throughout the Cold War and which might be termed the ‘problem of perceptions’. Thus, at the end of the twentieth century, there is some evidence that the Soviet Union may have been genuinely frightened of western Europe, from whence it had repeatedly been invaded. But there is little merit in using post-Cold War hindsight to claim that Western leaders, politicians and general staffs overreacted in the late 1940s. The fact is that both sides could react only according to their reasonable perceptions at the time, tempered by their background, upbringing and experience.

EUROPE IN THE POST-WAR ERA

One of the strongest influences on contemporary perceptions was the actual state of Europe in the immediate post-war period, with Europeans finding themselves, in Churchill’s words, in ‘a bewildered, baffled and breathless world’. Europe, apart from the neutral countries, was physically devastated and its many peoples were mentally and physically exhausted by the war they had just been through. Industry had been wrecked, road and rail communications had been largely destroyed, and sea transport was at a virtual standstill because of wartime shipping losses.

One of the major elements contributing to a marked feeling of instability was the mass migration in which, for a variety of reasons, vast numbers of refugees were moving around Europe. It was estimated – an exact figure was impossible – that some 30 million people (known as ‘displaced persons’ or ‘DPs’) were on the move, adding to the already serious difficulties suffered by the transportation, feeding and administrative systems. For a start there were some 9 million foreign workers who had been forcibly taken to Germany from the various occupied territories to bolster the workforce during 1940–44 and who now had to be repatriated. There were large groups of foreigners who had fought on the German side and who now did all they could to resist being returned to their homelands, where they faced retribution. There were also the surviving Jews and others from the concentration camps, who no longer wished to live in Europe and thus sought to emigrate to the USA, the UK, Australia or, in the case of many Jews, Palestine.

The Soviet Union also moved a large number of people by force. A process started in 1941 was continued in the early post-war period by transporting to Siberia people from the Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia), the former German territory of East Prussia, the Caucasus and the Crimea. Also, in 1944–5 ethnic Finns were forced to move out of Karelia when it was ceded to the Soviet Union.

In the face of the Soviet advance, ethnic Germans living in East Prussia fled westward, mainly by sea, although many fled overland. The movement continued after the war, with some of the refugees finding temporary asylum in Denmark.

There were also large ethnic German populations living in the Danube basin, mainly in eastern Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) and Hungary, and some of these fled, mainly to Austria, as the Red Army advanced in 1944–5. After the war’s end, however, the Potsdam Conference authorized the compulsory expulsion of the remainder of these people from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland – a move which rapidly got out of control and resulted in the deaths of some 3 million ethnic Germans. The vacuums created by these moves were then filled by an influx of nationals from the country concerned.

These movements were on such a vast scale and caused such massive disruption that they led to the setting up of the UN-sponsored International Relief Organization, headed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

EASTERN EUROPE

Invasions from the west in 1812, 1854, 1914, 1919 and 1941 and from the east in 1902, 1919 and 1939 were etched in Russian and Soviet folk memories. It was scarcely surprising, therefore, that in the late 1940s patriotic motives should have led the Soviet leadership to defend its territory from further incursions. In addition to that, however, was a perceived need not only to protect the Communist revolution, principally by maintaining the supremacy of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, but also to spread it.

Stalin had become obsessive about defence, and he sought to construct a series of buffer states around the Soviet Union, particularly in the west. As a first step, the Soviet Union occupied East Germany and eastern Austria; then it absorbed a number of smaller areas on its own borders. From 1946 onwards, however, Stalin progressively imposed control over other countries in what was tacitly acknowledged to be the ‘Soviet sphere of influence’. In part, he achieved his objectives by a series of bilateral treaties, but where he deemed these insufficient he sought to achieve total control of what came to be termed ‘Soviet satellites’.

In Albania, Enver Hoxha took power in 1945 and immediately formed a powerful centralized Communist government which, for the time being at least, was totally loyal to Moscow. Bulgaria, after the Germans left, was governed by the ‘Fatherland Front’ under the leadership of the Communist Georgi Dimitrov. The monarchy was abolished in 1947 and the Agrarian Party was eliminated, with its leader, Nikola Petkov, being given a show trial and then executed in September. The Communist Party was then the sole political force in the country.

The Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London negotiated with the Soviet government during the war, one outcome of which was an agreement to cede the Carpatho-Ukraine to the USSR. At the war’s end the Czechoslovak government was then able to return to Prague with Edward Beneš as president; it found the country occupied by Soviet and US troops, although these both departed in December 1945. An election was held in 1946 in which the Communists won 38 per cent of the vote and the resulting ‘National Front’ government was headed by the Communist leader, Klement Gottwald. One of the earliest items of business was the mass expulsion of the Sudetenland Germans, mentioned above, elements of whom had been instrumental in engineering the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Soviet Union then decided to bring Czechoslovakia to heel and, having banned Czech attendance at the Marshall Plan Conference in Paris in 1947, it sponsored a Communist coup in February 1948, in the aftermath of which the widely respected foreign minister Jan Masaryk died, allegedly by suicide. The trade unions responded with strikes and demonstrations which led to the Communists taking an even firmer grip on power, and when Gottwald took over from Beneš as president later that month Czechoslovakia was firmly in the Soviet camp.

Hungary fought during the Second World War on the German side, and on withdrawal of the Germans it signed an armistice with the Soviet Union which included provision for purging fascists and war criminals. Hungarian Communists returning to the country used the armistice as a mandate to eliminate unwanted democrats, and to expropriate property, not only from ethnic Germans and fascists, but also from the Catholic Church. Elections in 1945 resulted in the Small Landholders Party obtaining 60 per cent of the seats, while the Communists gained only 17 per cent, but in 1947 the Communists ‘revealed conspiracies’ by members of the Small Landholders Party which led to trials of some 220 members. The prime minister fled to Switzerland, but many others disappeared never to be seen again. New elections resulted in the victory of the Communist Party, and the country was forced to sign a trade pact with the Soviet Union on 14 July; thus Hungary too was firmly in the Soviet camp.

Poland had been overrun by the Red Army in 1944–5 and the Soviets stepped in quickly to install a provisional government (known as ‘the Lublin Committee’), thus outwitting the government-in-exile, which was still in London. In the post-war border adjustments Poland lost its eastern territories to the Soviet Union, while its western border with Germany was moved westward to the line of the rivers Oder and Neisse. The Polish Communist Party gradually eliminated opposition parties, and Stanislaw Mikołajczyk, the leader of the most powerful opposition group, the Agrarian Party, was warned of his imminent arrest in October 1947 and fled to London, thus escaping almost certain death. By 1948 Poland too was fully under Communist control.

In Romania, the small Communist Party formed the national Democratic Front with the Socialists and the Peasant Workers Front. This coalition won 90 per cent of the votes in the 1946 election, and when the opposition sought to dispute the result it was eliminated. In July 1947 Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the National Peasant Party, was tried and sentenced to solitary confinement for life, and in December 1947 the king was forced to abdicate. The ‘Unity Party’, under the Communist Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej, then took power in early 1948.

In Yugoslavia, the Communist Tito was the predominant partisan leader, and he immediately took power in 1945. Soviet troops, which had arrived in the country in December 1944, left in March 1945. Tito’s Popular Liberation Front obtained 90 per cent of the votes in the 1945 election, which was followed by widespread purging of political opponents and the nationalization of trade, industry, bank and social insurance. Yugoslavia signed a Mutual Assistance Pact with the Soviet Union in 1945 and appeared for a short time to be a firm member of the Soviet bloc, but in 1948 Tito broke with Stalin, who then, very unwisely (from his point of view), imposed an economic blockade, which forced Tito to turn to the West.

COMMUNISTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

Soviet activities were not confined to eastern Europe. Virtually all countries in western Europe had a domestic Communist party, most of which during the war had achieved a degree of respectability which stemmed in large part from their role in wartime resistance movements. There was also a widely felt admiration for the role played by the Soviet Union and its people in defeating Germany.

Perhaps the strongest Communist party in the West was in France, where it had numerous seats in the National Assembly, was very powerful in the trade-union movement, and even held four posts in the Cabinet, including that of minister of defence. The Communists managed to perform some extraordinary gyrations, one the one hand dancing to the dictates of Moscow (for example, by generating street violence in late 1947 as instructed at the Cominform meeting in mid-1947) and on the other by co-operation with General Charles De Gaulle[1] in opposition to the Marshall Plan and to NATO.

Italy, too, was in turmoil, with numerous political parties and former resistance groups all jostling for power – the situation being further complicated by the forcible return of ‘repatriated’ Italians from Yugoslavia and the colonies, and by the purging of the Fascists. The Christian Democrats emerged as the predominant political force, but the Communist Party, led by Palmiro Togliatti, was the second most powerful.

The Greek civil war had started even before the Germans departed in 1944, and British troops were forced to intervene to restore order. After a short-lived armistice, the Communists sought to take the country over by force and initially achieved some success, not least because they were able to operate out of sanctuaries in Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Initially, the government forces did not do well against them, their problems being exacerbated by the British withdrawal of support, for economic reasons, in 1947. But eventually the United States stepped in and ensured the government’s victory.

Nowhere, however, did the issues seem to be so well delineated as in the former German capital of Berlin, which had been split between the four wartime Allies in 1945, with the Soviet Union ruling the eastern half, while the three other Allies shared the western half. In the early years, relations between the Eastern and Western occupying powers reflected their disagreements at the United Nations, but Berlin itself occupied the centre of the stage when the Berlin blockade was imposed in 1947, as is described in more detail in Chapter 32.

Efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace treaty began in Paris in July 1946 and continued through to February 1947, with a number of agreements being reached. Among these were that Italy should pay reparations, lose its colonies, and give up Trieste, which would become a free state under UN supervision, while Hungary would revert to its 1937 borders and the Soviet seizure of Bessarabia and Bukovina from Romania was made legal. Finland was treated particularly harshly, the loss of Karelia to the USSR being made permanent, while strict limits were placed on its military capabilities.

Thus the picture of Europe in this period was one of a continent where order was slowly being restored, but with poverty and misery still widespread. Tens of millions of displaced persons were on the move, requiring resettlement somewhere, and, on top of all this, the Soviet Union was progressively imposing control over eastern Europe. In this latter process, non-Communist national leaders were being ousted and, more often than not, killed, and it was clear that if the Communists won the civil war in Greece the same would happen there. Also, in almost every diplomatic forum where Soviets met Westerners, such as the United Nations and the Six-Power Conference on Germany, the Soviet representatives either caused endless difficulties or simply exercised their veto.

As if all this was not enough, Asia was in turmoil. The Chinese Civil War was at its height in the late 1940s, with the Communists appearing certain to win. In addition, a number of western European powers found themselves involved in colonial wars. The French war against the Viet Minh in Indo-China broke out in 1947, while the British war in Malaya (a so-called ‘emergency’) started in 1948; in both cases the enemy were Communists. In divided Korea, the Communists in the North were beginning to menace the non-Communist South. Everything seemed to confirm the widespread perception of a Communist drive for world power.

It is, therefore, scarcely surprising that in such an atmosphere Western leaders began to look to their defences – something which, with the elimination of the German threat, many had hoped to place into a state of benevolent neglect for at least a decade.

The capitals of western Europe were pervaded by a sense of impending crisis as the blows came thick and fast, and, in the face of what appeared to be an imminent catastrophe, they struggled to find some means of regional co-operation and common defence. Their initial and somewhat hesitant attempts had varied degrees of success, but all eventually came together in a major success – the North Atlantic Treaty.

THE DUNKIRK TREATY

The first major post-war treaty in western Europe was the Anglo-French Treaty of Dunkirk, which was signed on 4 March 1947. On the surface this was a fifty-year mutual-defence treaty against future German aggression, although both countries understood that it was really aimed against the Soviet Union. As the Soviet activities in eastern Europe continued to cause alarm, however, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, suggested that there should be a network of similar bilateral treaties between like-minded countries, but he soon changed his views and began to advocate widening the scope of the Dunkirk Treaty to include the Benelux countries.

THE BRUSSELS TREATY

Benelux was one of the first groupings to be formed after the Second World War and consisted of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, all of which had previously tried neutrality in one form or another. Belgium had been neutral since its creation in 1839, but was overrun in both 1914 and 1940 because it had the misfortune to sit on the planned German routes into France. The Netherlands had also long been neutral, and managed to remain so in the First World War, but, like the rest of continental Europe, was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War. Unlike the other two, Luxembourg’s neutrality was not voluntary but had been imposed by the Treaty of London (1867), although the country’s small size and virtually disarmed status meant that the treaty proved to be totally ineffective in both world wars.

The idea of co-operation between the three countries had been mooted during the war and led, in due course, to a customs union in 1948. The countries had, however, already agreed to co-operate in foreign-policy matters, and this led to a conference in Luxembourg in January 1948 at which they agreed on a common defence policy, in which the idea of a network of bilateral agreements would be rejected in favour of multilateral regional agreements. Thus, when invited by France and the UK to join the Dunkirk Treaty, they adopted a common line that it was pointless having a treaty unless it was designed for protection against the Soviet Union, and to be effective such a treaty, they suggested, must include the USA – although this was not achieved in the short term.

Negotiations began in January 1948, and such was the pressure of events (particularly the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia) that a draft was circulated on 19 February and the new Brussels Treaty (also known as the Western Union) was initialled on 13 March and signed on 17 March 1948.

This treaty, in which the Five Powers (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the UK) agreed to collaborate in defence as well as in the political, economic and cultural fields, was unique in several ways. First, although there had been many previous peacetime alliances, this was the first to establish a permanent political and military organization in western Europe in peacetime. Second, it was formed to counter aggression in general and, unlike the Dunkirk Treaty, was ostensibly not directed against a specific threat, although there was little doubt, either then or later, that it was actually aimed at the Soviet Union. Third, it introduced a series of permanent bodies, rather than leaving the planning to sporadic liaison meetings between the relevant national military staffs.[2]

The negotiations leading to the signature of the Brussels Treaty did briefly consider the question of the Nordic countries, but they were quickly excluded, primarily because the five signatories considered themselves unable to offer a realistic guarantee of military protection to Scandinavia. This view was the result of contemporary military assessments coupled with a perceptible lack of enthusiasm for such a task among the Continental parties to the treaty, although for France and the UK memories of their disastrous attempt to help Norway in 1940 also played a part.

The aim of the defence organization was to provide for military and logistic co-ordination between the Five Powers and for the study of the tactical problems of the defence of western Europe. In addition, it was intended to provide the framework on which a command organization could be based in time of crisis or war. At the top of the organization was the Defence Committee, which in peacetime was composed of the defence ministers of the Five Powers; this was served by the Chiefs-of-Staff Committee and the Military Supply Board, both of which met regularly, usually in London.

The Chiefs-of-Staff Committee was responsible for advising the Defence Committee on all matters affecting the defence of western Europe, although it was also required to take into account members’ commitments in other parts of the world – a not insignificant requirement when, with the exception of Luxembourg, four members still had large overseas possessions. Within this broad directive the committee’s special tasks were to ensure that:

• the military resources of the five member countries were organized to meet the strategic requirements of the alliance;

• the forces of the various nations were welded into an effective fighting machine;

• the combined military resources of the five nations were allotted in the best way;

• a proper balance was maintained between the conflicting requirements of the European battle, on one hand, and internal security and home defence, on the other;

• the necessary resources were assessed, prepared and distributed, in particular to the commander of the European battle, whose special task would be to make the necessary operational plans and to put them into operation.

The Chiefs-of-Staff Committee was formed on 30 April 1948 and immediately set to work. In a significant move, the United States was invited to send military observers to London to help the committee with its work, particularly on plans and the thorny problem of supplies. As a result, a US delegation arrived in London in June, headed by Major-General Lyman L. Lemnitzer (who was later to be a NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe).

Meanwhile, the Chiefs-of-Staff Committee was hard at work, and produced its first report in the astonishingly short time of two weeks. One of its fundamental conclusions was that, in the event of war with the USSR, the Five Powers should fight as far east in Germany as possible, in order not only to protect their own territories but also to create time for the USA to intervene.

Another outcome of the Chief-of-Staff Committee’s work was the creation of the Western Union Defence Organization, a permanent planning and liaison organization, which officially started work on 3 October 1948 at Fontainebleau, France. It was headed by a Commanders-in-Chief Committee chaired by the most prestigious European soldier of the day, Britain’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. The other members were:

• Commander-in-Chief Western Europe Land Forces – General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (France);

• Commander-in-Chief Western Europe Air Forces – Air Chief Marshal Sir James Robb (UK);

• Flag Officer, Western Europe – Vice-Admiral Jaujard (France).

In this organization, Montgomery had two small headquarters: one in London, the other in Fontainebleau, where it sat alongside the land and air headquarters. The committee was not as powerful as appeared, however, since the land and air members became commanders-in-chief only in war, while, as was clear from his title, the ‘Flag Officer, Western Europe’ had no allocated naval forces. Montgomery’s position also gave rise to some problems, since he was not a supreme commander but simply the chairman of a committee, and in addition to this there was a personality clash with de Lattre de Tassigny, who, like Montgomery, was a man with firm views, not least concerning his own importance.

Despite its shortcomings, the organization was a start and the United States Joint Chiefs-of-Staff were so keen to be seen to support it that, in an unprecedented move, they sent two lieutenant-colonels to Fontainebleau to work with the new headquarters as ‘non-participating members’.

The Brussels Treaty had many deficiencies. Its terminology was imprecise, it did not contain an agreement to go to war automatically, nor did it give the commanders sufficient troops for the proposed tasks, and, most important of all, it did not directly involve the Americans. On the other hand, it had the important short-term benefit of demonstrating to the United States that western European countries were, at long last, prepared to co-operate and combine for the common good. It also proved to be of great utility in providing the political vehicle for the admission of West Germany to European defence in 1954. Above all, however, it proved to be the starting point for a much more significant agreement: the North Atlantic Treaty.

The seriousness of the position between East and West was emphasized when, on the day that the Brussels Treaty was signed, US president Harry S. Truman addressed a joint session of Congress. He declared the United States’ full support for the treaty, but he also requested Congress to authorize the reintroduction of selective service.

A NORDIC PACT?

The end of the war had found the Soviet Union in possession of much of the Baltic littoral, including Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and East Prussia, and in occupation of Poland and the eastern zone of Germany. The USSR had also occupied Finnmark, the northernmost Norwegian province, and the Danish-owned Baltic island of Bornholm in 1945, primarily in order to take the surrender of the German forces; both were, however, handed back peacefully, Finnmark in late 1945 and Bornholm in the spring of 1946.

Despite this, Denmark and Norway found themselves faced with a palpable Soviet threat in early 1948 and started to examine the question of a defence pact, although initially they considered only limited membership based on a ‘Nordic’ grouping. These countries wished to avoid becoming involved in the Great Power rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union, and were also keen to avoid becoming embroiled in the tensions in continental Europe immediately to their south.

The most powerful and prosperous of the Nordic countries was Sweden, which had successfully maintained its armed neutrality throughout both world wars and wished to continue to do so. Thus, in the immediate post-war period Sweden performed a delicate balancing act, making a 1 billion kronor loan to the Soviet Union, but also purchasing 150 P-51 Mustang piston-engined fighters from the USA, followed by 210 Vampire jets from the UK in 1948.

Norway had been occupied by the Germans during the war, partly because of its strategic position, but also because German industry depended upon Norwegian iron-ore production. In the post-war period Norway considered the Soviet threat to be very real, and its leaders began to seek a guarantee of security which would nevertheless not antagonize the Soviet Union.

Denmark was initially well disposed towards the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the war, but became increasingly concerned by the events in eastern Europe. In the spring of 1948 the country was swept by a rumour that the Russians intended to attack western Europe during the Easter weekend. This rumour turned out to have been ill-founded, but the Danes realized that neutrality was no longer a serious option and that some form of multinational co-operation was therefore essential. During its Second World War occupation by the Germans, Denmark, unlike many other occupied countries in western Europe, had been almost totally isolated from the UK and had been forced to look to its neighbour Sweden for what little help and support that neutral country could offer. It was only natural, therefore, that in the late 1940s it should wish to explore the possibilities of an alliance with Sweden.

On 19 April 1948 the Norwegian foreign minister, Halvard Lange, made a speech in which he publicly expressed interest in a ‘Nordic’ solution – by which he meant one involving Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

Finland would also have been a natural member of a Nordic grouping, but the USSR made that impossible. The peace treaty had imposed strict manpower ceilings on Finland’s armed forces[3] and, as if this was not enough, the country was effectively neutralized by the treaty of ‘Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance’ that the Soviet Union had forced it to sign on 6 April.

The Norwegian initiative was considered by the Swedish parliament, which authorized its government to consult Denmark and Norway on the subject. Throughout these discussions the basic Swedish position was that Sweden would not stretch its neutrality beyond a Nordic grouping, which would be non-aligned and strong enough to remain uncommitted to either East or West; in particular, Sweden was not prepared to participate if any other members had bilateral links to outside parties. On the other hand, the Norwegians considered that their interests would best be served by joining an Atlantic pact (i.e. one involving the United States), while the Danish prime minister sought to find common ground between the other two parties. Having established their initial positions, in September 1948 these three countries set up a Defence Committee whose task was to study the practical possibilities of defence co-operation.

At the political level, in October 1948 the Danish and Norwegian foreign ministers sounded out the US secretary of state, George Marshall, about the likely US attitude to a Nordic pact. He told them that it would be very difficult for the US government to give military guarantees to a neutral bloc, and that any supplies of military equipment would inevitably take lower priority than to formal allies.

In January 1949 the Nordic Defence Committee reported that a trilateral military alliance would increase the defensive power of the three participants both by widening their respective strategic areas and through the benefits of common planning and standardization of equipment. All this, however, could be achieved only if Denmark and Norway underwent substantial rearmament. And even if all of this were achieved, the military experts advized that the Nordic pact would be unable to resist an attack by a Great Power (by which, of course, they meant the Soviet Union).

Having received the military report, the three prime ministers and their foreign ministers met on 5–6 January 1949 and discussed a variety of topics, including how to achieve the rearmament of Denmark and Norway. Then on 14 January the US government announced publicly what it had already advised in private, namely that the priority in provision of arms would be to countries which joined the US in a collective defence agreement. The Nordic prime ministers and foreign ministers reconvened at the end of the month, and on 30 January they announced that it was impossible to reach agreement; the potential Nordic pact was thus consigned to history.

AT THE END of the Second World War by far the most powerful of the Western Allies was the United States. There were US garrisons all over Europe, including Austria, Belgium, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and Yugoslavia, although manning levels were rapidly reduced wherever possible. The USA was hoping for a virtually total disengagement from Europe and sought to avoid any new commitments in the area, but in February 1947 the British dropped a bombshell when their foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, informed the US government that the UK, ravaged by war, striving desperately to administer a huge empire, in the throes of the worst winter on record and to all intents bankrupt, would be compelled to end its military assistance to Greece from the beginning of April. Indeed, Britain’s true position was revealed when its government had to go cap in hand to Washington with a request for a $4.4 billion loan later in that year. Faced with the British fait accompli, the Truman administration felt it had no option but to take the British place in supporting Greece, thus initiating a policy of involvement in European affairs which has continued to this day.

The United States’ most natural ally in Europe was the United Kingdom, with which it had close blood ties and with which it had been closely allied in two world wars. In the early post-war years, however, there were several stresses in the UK–US relationship, in which a variety of factors was involved. One was financial, and included problems such as the sudden termination of the provision of military equipment under the ‘Lend-Lease’ scheme and achieving agreement on how to work out a precise figure for the British debt incurred to the USA during the 1939–45 period. The British also felt frustrated by the US denial of access to atomic weapons, not least because British scientists had given substantial help to their development in the Manhattan Project.

Palestine was also a problem. The British administered the territory under the terms of a pre-war League of Nations mandate, and in 1946–7 British troops there were seen to be forcibly turning back Jewish refugees from Europe – something which did not go down well with the politically active Jewish community in the USA. The USA also had very firm ideas on the continued British imperial retention of the Indian subcontinent, as well as an instinctive mistrust of Attlee’s left-wing government. Above all was the realization (perhaps more clearly in the United States than in the United Kingdom) that, while Britain, with its empire, had entered the Second World War Two as the strongest single power in the world, it had emerged from it as demonstrably weaker – politically, militarily and economically.

Despite these strains, the Americans and British worked closely together in many areas, particularly when dealing with the Soviet Union. Thus, when Soviet intransigence led to the break-up of the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London on 15 December 1947 Bevin took the opportunity to outline to George Marshall a proposal for a two-tier defence system for western Europe which would include the USA. Marshall’s immediate response was that any talk of a US military guarantee was premature, to say the least, but nevertheless he agreed that talks about such a treaty could start, albeit confined initially to the English-speaking north-Atlantic nations: Canada, the UK and the USA.

Meanwhile, the Soviet leaders were extending their control to countries outside the Soviet bloc. Thus, at the same time that the Communist coup was taking place in Czechoslovakia (February 1948), Stalin dispatched a formal invitation to the Finnish president to visit Moscow to negotiate a treaty of friendship, similar to those which Hungary and Romania had recently been compelled to sign. The Finnish president was seventy-eight years old, his country was small and devastated by war; there was little choice but to sign.

As these Soviet–Finnish negotiations were taking place, the Norwegian government received information from several directions that Stalin’s next ‘offer’ of a friendship treaty would be to Norway. These sources were clearly authentic and were sufficiently serious for the Norwegian foreign minister to hold urgent talks with the American ambassador on 11 March 1948 to inform him of what he had heard. He saw the British ambassador on the same day, but, having passed on the same information he had just given to the American, he then went significantly further, telling the Briton that Norway would refuse any Soviet demands for concessions, and that if this meant that the Soviet Union would attack Norway, then so be it: Norway would resist. That said, he then formally asked the ambassador what help Norway might expect to receive from Britain if attacked. To which the ambassador could only respond that he would contact his government and await a reply.

When the Norwegian enquiry reached London, Bevin immediately communicated his views to George Marshall, describing how the possession of Norway would turn western Europe’s northern flank and give the Soviet fleet access to the Atlantic. He also admitted that, as things were, the Brussels Treaty powers were insufficiently powerful to protect themselves, let alone to make a realistic offer of help to Norway. He therefore proposed a regional ‘Atlantic Approaches Pact of Mutual Assistance’, in which all of the countries directly threatened by a Soviet move to the Atlantic could participate, including, the USA, the UK, Canada, Eire, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, France and (when it had a democratic regime) Spain.

Marshall considered Bevin’s message, discussed it with President Truman, and replied to the British ambassador on 12 March, suggesting that talks should begin the following week. Bevin responded on 14 March, stating that a British delegation would arrive on 22 March and suggesting that Canada should be included in these further talks, which was agreed by both Washington and Ottawa within days. The British Cabinet considered the briefing to be given to their representative at these talks on 16 March, and thus, even as the Brussels Treaty was being signed on 17 March, the talks on its supersession were already under way. This did not mean that the Brussels Treaty had been superfluous; indeed, without it the US administration and Congress could well have doubted the European ability to rally together for the common good. The tripartite talks started in Washington on 22 March, and lasted for eleven days.[1]

Several events in late 1948 were of considerable importance to the eventual North Atlantic Treaty. First, in October the five Brussels Treaty foreign ministers announced their complete agreement on the principle of an Atlantic treaty and invited France to produce a first draft. On 11 November this document was duly presented to the Standing Committee of the Brussels Treaty, and the final draft was agreed by all five governments on 26 November and dispatched to Washington on 29 November, where on 4 December it was considered by the British and Canadian ambassadors and the US secretary of state. Considering the novelty, scope and importance of the subject, the usually stately progress of diplomatic negotiations and the involvement of five governments, this was quite breathtaking speed.

Meanwhile, on 8 November a formal meeting took place between the Western Union Commanders-in-Chief Committee and the Commander-in-Chief, US Forces Germany. This was held at Melle, France, and considered the military aspects of a possible Atlantic treaty.

More important even than all of these, however, was the US presidential election in November, which, rather naturally, had diverted the attention of many members of the US government, not least of Truman himself. Truman was widely predicted to have little chance of success, but one of the fruits of his unexpected victory was that most of the principal US actors in this drama remained in place, the major exception being George Marshall, who took the opportunity to retire and was replaced by Dean Acheson.

Various schemes for a new alliance were considered. The first was simply to extend the Brussels Treaty to include the USA and, perhaps, Italy. Another scheme was to have an Atlantic pact running in parallel to the Brussels Treaty; this would include only countries with Atlantic coastlines – i.e. Canada, France, the UK, the USA and, of course, Norway. Some consideration was also given to yet a third body, a Mediterranean pact, primarily as a means of including Italy.

An Ambassadors Committee comprising representatives of Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, France, the Netherlands and the UK, chaired by the US secretary of state, also considered a number of geographical factors. In a move which has subsequently been misinterpreted, the Tropic of Cancer was adopted as the southern boundary of the treaty. This was simply meant to be a device to preclude any African, Caribbean or Latin American country from joining and not, as was subsequently believed, to place an absolute barrier on any collective planning, manoeuvres or operations south of the Tropic of Cancer in the Atlantic Ocean.

As in all negotiations, problems were encountered from time to time, but what came to be known as ‘the NATO spirit’ produced a feeling of mutual desire to reach a satisfactory conclusion, with the ambassadors managing to take their respective foreign ministers along with them, while the US State Department kept the Senate Foreign Relations Committee involved.

MEMBERSHIP

At the start of the Washington discussions it was clear that membership of the proposed alliance would include the Brussels Treaty powers (the Benelux countries, France and the UK), Canada and the United States, but there was some discussion over other potential members.

It was considered highly desirable that Denmark and Norway should join the proposed alliance, and, if possible, Sweden as well. These were long-established democracies and were as much threatened as any other country in Europe; indeed, in 1948–9 Norway was probably the most threatened of them all. Further, they occupied very important strategic positions. Denmark sat astride the western end of the Baltic, dominating (with Sweden) the Skaggerak and the Belts; it also owned the island of Bornholm in the middle of the Baltic. Of greater importance to the United States, however, was Danish ownership of Greenland, which was a vital stepping-stone in the air route from the United States to Europe at a time when transport aircraft had a comparatively short range. Norway was also strategically important, since it lay along the southern flank of the Soviet Union’s naval routes to the Atlantic and shared (with the USSR) the island of Spitsbergen. Sweden, however, was adamant that it would not abrogate its neutrality, and its membership was not pursued.

Once talk of an Atlantic pact started, Canada, the UK and the USA all expressed a desire that Iceland should be a founder member, as did Norway when it joined the discussions. Iceland was a small, unarmed nation which found itself occupying a key strategic position in the North Atlantic. It had become independent from Denmark in 1918 and had made an immediate declaration of perpetual neutrality, although Denmark had retained responsibility for its foreign affairs until April 1940. During the Second World War Iceland had been occupied by British troops, who arrived on 10 May 1940, but in July 1941 these had been replaced by US troops, the last of whom departed in April 1947. The US had, however, negotiated the right for its aircraft to transit through Keflavik for as long as US occupation forces remained in Germany.

Iceland had been seeking its own partners, but appreciated early on that it could obtain no realistic guarantee of protection from the proposed Nordic pact. An Icelandic mission visited the USA on 14–17 March and was given an assurance that Iceland would have a special position in the alliance, that it would not be required to produce any armed forces, and that no foreign troops would be stationed in Iceland in peacetime. A very lively domestic debate eventually resulted in agreement to join.

Italy was a more difficult problem. It had emerged from the war in a weak position, having first fought as a partner with Germany and Japan in the Axis pact, before signing an armistice in 1943 and then joining the Allies as a ‘Co-Belligerent’. For some years after the war Italy was not a member of the United Nations, and when discussions about a potential Atlantic treaty began there was considerable debate on whether Italy should be included or not. Internally, there was no clear support among the Italian people for such an alliance, and the Left – in particular the very strong Communist Party – wanted to declare the country neutral. Externally, there was some reluctance among other potential members who had been at war with Italy until only a few years earlier, while the United States seemed to waver: on one hand it did not want to upset other potential members, but, on the other, it did not want to upset the large Italian community in the USA. Some even argued that the northern orientation of the proposed treaty – its title had already been tentatively agreed as the ‘North Atlantic Treaty’ – appeared, by definition, to exclude the ‘southern-tier’ nations.

The United States encouraged Italy to seek to join the Western Union, but the visit of the Italian Chief of General Staff, General Marras, to the USA in December 1948 appears to have hardened the US official position in its favour. Thus, when the Ambassadors Committee, now including a representative of Norway, met in Washington on 4 March 1949 Acheson’s opening speech included the statement that the United States favoured Italian membership. Ernest Bevin had included Italy in his original proposals for a Europe-wide defence treaty, but thereafter he expressed some reservations; faced with this firm proposal by the United States, however, these reservations were withdrawn and Italy was invited to join the talks on 8 March and accepted on 11 March.

Unlike other potential members, Portugal was a dictatorship, and was not invited to join the Washington talks until early 1949. Portugal stipulated that accession to the treaty would not mean that it would accept foreign troops stationed on its territory (Norway had stipulated likewise), although US bases were permitted in the strategically important Azores.

France, as usual during this period, was beset by domestic political problems. In early 1947 the government was formed from a coalition of centrist parties, and on 4 May the prime minister, the Socialist Paul Ramadier, dismissed Maurice Thorez and three other Communists from government. Despite these upheavals, France joined the United Kingdom in the Dunkirk Treaty and shared the lead with the United Kingdom in finalizing the Brussels Treaty. In 1949 the new prime minister, Henri Queuille, said that the United States must not allow France and western Europe to be invaded by the Soviet Union as they had been by Germany, and also added that the defence of western Europe must start on the Elbe (i.e. the border between the Soviet and Anglo-US zones of occupation). Not surprisingly, the French Communists were greatly opposed to the North Atlantic Treaty, but it went to the National Assembly on 17 May and was approved on 27 July.

United States’ membership of a peacetime European defence pact was by no means a foregone conclusion either, and one of the key factors in any US involvement had to be the agreement of the US Congress. Here the master stroke was the decision to ‘allow’ the Senate to take the initiative. Thus was born the ‘Vandenberg Resolution’, which, like many things in NATO’s birth, went through the governmental system in an exceptionally short time. Thus, the first discussions were held with Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on 11 April, a draft was first considered by the Foreign Relations Committee on 11 May, and it was passed by the Senate (by a majority of 64 to 6) on 11 June 1948. The resolution recommended that the president should pursue:

Several other countries were considered for membership during the original negotiations, but their cases were either postponed or rejected for one reason or another. It was recognized from the start that West German membership would be inevitable, but would not be appropriate in the first instance. Similarly, it was always intended that Greece, Turkey and Spain would eventually become members.

There was some discussion of the NATO guarantee of mutual defence being extended to cover Belgian, British, Dutch and French overseas possessions. The countries concerned allowed this suggestion to be quietly dropped, except that the ‘Algerian Departments of France’ were included in Article 6 and Danish membership was always understood to include Greenland.

The Republic of Ireland had remained neutral throughout the war and had denied the Allies the use of any facilities such as ports and airfields. In spite of this, the UK was keen for Eire to join the proposed Atlantic pact, and the Irish government was invited to attend the negotiations in mid-1948. When, however, the Irish government replied that it would join the discussions only if the UK promised to transfer the Six Counties (the predominantly Protestant North) to the Republic of Ireland, the matter was immediately dropped and was never reopened.

The treaty was signed on 4 April 1949, following which the member countries secured national endorsement, which, as is made clear from Table 2.1 was obtained by overwhelming majorities, auguring well for the success of the resulting North Atlantic Treaty Organization.[2]

The armed forces of the twelve NATO powers at the start of the Alliance in 1949 were not impressive, however. The vast American and British wartime fleets had been drastically reduced, with large numbers of ships either scrapped or placed in low-readiness reserve. The air forces numbered less than 1,000 operational aircraft, most of which were obsolete Second World War piston-engined machines, with small numbers of modern jet-engined aircraft concentrated in the British and US air forces. On land there were some twenty nominal divisions, most of which were involved in occupation duties and were poorly equipped and organized for modern war.

Despite these military shortcomings, the Alliance had made a sound start. The Europe of the period was in an extremely agitated state, and both political and military leaders had more than enough problems to deal with, both domestically and, in many cases, abroad. Despite this, the whole process of setting up NATO was achieved with a certainty of common purpose, a deftness of diplomatic and political touch, and a generosity of spirit which can only be viewed with admiration. The speed with which decisions were taken was extraordinary, as was the way in which normal diplomatic procedures were brushed aside in order to achieve results.

THE DIPLOMATIC SCENE

ONCE THE EUPHORIA resulting from signing the treaty on 4 April 1949 had died down, NATO’s most senior body, the North Atlantic Council, met at foreign-minister level in September and established a number of permanent bodies, including the Defence Council and the Military Committee, as well as regional planning groups to cover the Alliance area. The momentum was maintained by the Defence Council, which in December 1949 agreed to a strategic concept and in the following April to the first draft of a medium-term defence plan.

The invasion of South Korea by the Communist North in June 1950 caused considerable anxiety in western Europe and seemed to prove the case for the existence of the Atlantic Alliance. As a direct result, in September 1950 NATO formally adopted the concept of ‘forward defence’ (i.e. as far to the east as possible) in order to resist similar aggression in Europe. Such a strategy could only be implemented in western Europe by troops stationed in West Germany and, although it had been discussed informally for some time, the question of rearming West Germany was raised formally.

Repeated reorganizations eventually resulted in the appointment of the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) in 1950, and of the first Secretary-General, Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT) and Commander-in-Chief Channel (CINCHAN) in 1952. That year also saw the first expansion, when Greece and Turkey were brought into the Alliance, thus extending its coverage to include all of the Mediterranean and bringing the Alliance face to face with the USSR on the Soviet–Turkish border. With the inclusion of Turkey, NATO now included an Islamic nation, which was to prove significant in later years, although the traditional hostility between Greece and Turkey caused repeated complications, and required a very delicate balance to ensure that neither party felt that the other was being given any form of preferential treatment.

In these first few years the Alliance concentrated on three areas: increasing its defence potential, getting its organization structure right and rearming Germany. The original proposal to solve the ‘German question’ was the creation of a European Defence Community in which West Germany could participate, but this was negated when the French National Assembly voted against such an organization in August 1954. This setback caused a new round of diplomatic activity, which involved both West Germany and Italy joining the Western Union (Brussels Treaty) and was finally resolved in the Paris Agreement of 23 October 1954, under which:

• the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) – West Germany – was declared a sovereign state;

• American, British and French forces in the FRG ceased to be there by right of occupation but remained at the invitation of the government of the FRG;

• the FRG joined NATO;

• the UK and the USA undertook to maintain forces in continental Europe for as long as might be necessary;

• the Western Union was renamed the Western European Union.

The FRG acceded to the NATO alliance on 5 May 1955, and on 14 May the Soviet Union announced the establishment of the Warsaw Pact (see Chapter 6). Despite the resulting furore, however, with some treaties being torn up and new ones being signed, the four Second World War allies were still able to sign the Austrian Peace Treaty on 15 May, ending the military occupation of that country.

A Four Power summit was also held in Geneva to discuss a possible peace treaty with Germany, but two sessions – the first in July, the second in October – failed to reach a satisfactory conclusion. The year ended with the Soviet announcement of a policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’, but any optimism generated in NATO was dashed in 1956 by two major events. The joint Anglo-French invasion of Egypt was the first crisis to create serious strains within the Alliance, while the major external event was the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which once again demonstrated the Soviet Union’s determination to maintain its hegemony in eastern Europe. The threat was further enhanced by Soviet progress in the ‘space race’, where a number of successes, such as the launch of the first space satellite in October 1957, showed a capability with major repercussions for the arms race.

In the spring of 1960 the Soviet Union suddenly announced that it had shot down a US ‘spy plane’ on a flight over its territory and had captured the pilot, who had parachuted to safety. US president Dwight D. Eisenhower had little alternative but to admit that the USA had been conducting espionage flights, and announced that they had been suspended forthwith, but his Soviet opposite number, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, refused to accept this and stormed out of the 16 May Geneva summit conference in protest.

NATO’s momentum increased as members realized that it was a source not only of military but also of political strength. The ‘Athens Guidelines’, issued in 1962, gave a broad outline of the circumstances under which NATO would consider using nuclear weapons and what political discussions might be feasible in a crisis. Later in 1962, however, the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union attempted to place nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island, overshadowed everything that had gone before. The USA and the USSR confronted each other in the western Atlantic. NATO was essentially on the sidelines, although the Alliance issued a formal endorsement of the US actions. One of the outcomes of the Cuban crisis was that in 1963 the USA and the UK assigned some of their existing nuclear forces to NATO, but a related proposal for a NATO-owned and -operated nuclear force came to naught.

In 1963 US president John F. Kennedy paid an extremely successful visit to Europe, which included his famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech in West Berlin. His assassination later in the year came as a major shock to NATO, although there was muted relief when it became clear that this was not the result of some Soviet plot. Then in 1964 Khrushchev was ousted in a bloodless coup and, on 16 October, China exploded its first atomic bomb.

The year 1966 saw a succession of problems with France culminate in the announcement that French forces would be withdrawn from the integrated command structure (see Chapter 4). A corollary was that NATO had to remove all installations not under French command from French soil, which caused a major exodus of headquarters to the Low Countries, and of US military facilities to West Germany and the UK.

In 1967 the Military Committee conducted NATO’s first major strategic review since 1956, proposing a change from the ‘tripwire’ strategy[1] to ‘flexible response’ which was approved at a December 1967 ministerial meeting.[2] Under this new concept, NATO devized a multitude of balanced responses, both nuclear and conventional, which, in the event of Warsaw Pact aggression, could be implemented in a balanced fashion, depending upon the prevailing circumstances.^{1} That year also saw the publication of the ‘Harmel Report’ on Future Tasks of the Alliance, which restated the principles of the Alliance, stressed the importance of common approaches and greater consultation, and drew ‘particular attention to the defence problems of the exposed areas e.g. the South-Eastern flank’.^{2}

In 1968 Communist eastern Europe suffered yet another of its periodic upheavals, this time in Czechoslovakia, leading to an invasion by Warsaw Pact forces, which, while NATO took no overt military action, did cause the Alliance to review its responses to aggression. NATO also issued a warning about the dangers inherent in the Soviet advocacy of the right to intervene in the affairs of a fellow member of the ‘Socialist Commonwealth’, a somewhat elusive body whose existence was not recognized by the United Nations. However, by doing nothing to interfere with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, NATO members appeared to give at least tacit acknowledgement to the existence of a Soviet ‘Great Power sphere of influence’ in which the rules which normally governed the behaviour of smaller states did not apply.

The following two years saw important diplomatic initiatives. In late 1969 the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) was held in November; this was followed in December by the launch of the West German government’s ‘Ostpolitik’. Chancellor Willy Brandt’s strategy proved very fruitful and resulted in a German–Soviet Treaty in August 1970 and a German–Polish Treaty four months later, and these were accompanied by direct talks between West and East Germany, which started in March 1970. In addition to all these, France, the UK and the USA took a separate initiative by starting talks with the USSR on Berlin.

The NATO proposal for talks on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR), which had first been made in 1968, finally elicited a Soviet response in 1971. Other talks also bore fruit in 1971, with the signing not only of the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin – the first such written agreement since 1949 – but also of an agreement between West and East Germany on civil access to the city. Then, in the following year, both the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty Round I (SALT I) were signed, and discussions on SALT II started.

This series of successes in the early 1970s gave rise to one of a periodic series of feelings of optimism, which led in May 1972 to the adoption of a NATO proposal for a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), to be held in Helsinki. The preparatory round of CSCE talks ended in June 1973 and the conference proper began in July, attended by representatives from thirty-three European states (Albania was the only one refusing to attend), plus the United States and Canada. The feeling of real progress continued with the opening of the MBFR talks in Vienna in January 1973.

This apparently new era in East–West relations, coupled with unprecedented economic well-being in most NATO countries, inevitably led to a lessening in the cohesion of NATO, but the Alliance continued. A salutary lesson from outside Europe came in October 1973, when the Egyptians carried out a major attack across the Suez Canal which took the Israelis completely by surprise – an ominous warning of what might happen in Europe if NATO lowered its guard. In addition, the Arab–Israeli war dragged in both the USA and the USSR, both of which made threatening gestures, including placing at least part of their nuclear forces on a higher alert status. Although direct confrontation was averted, the events reminded NATO members of the dangers of a sudden crisis – a reminder which was emphasized by evidence of a continuing Soviet military build-up in eastern Europe.

NATO reached its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1974 with a feeling of cautious optimism. Diplomatic negotiations were going well, the German Democratic Republic – East Germany – had been recognized by the Western countries, the two Germanies had been admitted to the United Nations in September 1973, Soviet first secretary Leonid Brezhnev had visited both Berlin and Washington, also in 1973, and the MBFR talks were firmly under way.

The following years were a continuation of these processes, and détente seemed almost to have attained a degree of permanence until on 27 December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This event had a major impact on NATO, since it appeared that behind the Soviet offers of arms control and reductions in East–West tension there still lurked the inherent aggressiveness which had caused NATO to be formed thirty years previously. The apprehension caused by the invasion of Afghanistan was increased by the threat of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Poland as the ‘Solidarity’ trade-union movement gathered pace, culminating in the takeover of power by General Wojciech Jaruzelski on 19 October 1981. On 13 December this was followed by the declaration of martial law, which led to wide-scale arrests, imprisonment and deaths.

The early and mid-1980s were characterized by a roller-coaster effect as relationships between East and West seemed to alternate abruptly between improvement and deterioration. The Alliance believed that the strategic balance of forces was tipping ever more in the favour of the USSR, and 1981 saw the first issue of a US-government unclassified report titled Soviet Military Power, a well-produced, illustrated and relatively detailed publication which was subsequently issued annually.^{3} The Soviet Union made an immediate response by publishing its own glossy assessment of the balance of power, titled Whence the Threat to Peace?^{4} NATO then decided to join in this ‘documentary war’, publishing its own, somewhat less glossy, assessment of the balance in 1982.^{5}

Spain’s membership of the Alliance had first been discussed in the preliminary talks in Washington in 1948, and had been raised periodically thereafter, but it finally became reality in December 1981. Although Spanish delegates immediately took part in Alliance decision-making, however, some years were to pass before Spain decided to join the integrated command structure.

Throughout this period the problem of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) was rumbling on, sparked by the Soviet decision to deploy SS-20 missiles in eastern Europe, which is described in greater detail in Chapter 4.

The US presidential elections in 1980 resulted in victory by Ronald Reagan, who on taking power in January 1981 immediately brought a new sense of direction to both US and Alliance discussions. One of his early moves was the 1983 announcement of the start of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was intended to provide a guaranteed defensive shield against incoming missiles and to be superior to a strategy depending upon a heavy counter-attack. The Soviet Union became extremely agitated about SDI, since it threatened to negate the value of its vast stocks of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs). Also in 1983 NATO, having failed to persuade the Soviet Union to stop deploying SS-20s, started to deploy Pershing II missiles in West Germany and ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in the UK and the FRG.

In 1984 NATO approved SACEUR’s new concept known as ‘Follow-On Forces Attack’ (FOFA). Soviet operational plans were known to be based on sudden attacks by in-place forces (i.e. those already in position in eastern Europe in peacetime), which were designated ‘first echelon forces’ by NATO. The Soviets intended that this first echelon would keep going for as long as possible, but that, if it was halted by NATO forces, they would then pass through fresh, previously uncommitted forces, designated the ‘second echelon’, to restore the momentum of the attack. FOFA was concerned with conventional operations to locate, attack and destroy Warsaw Pact second-echelon forces before they were committed; it required target-acquisition means that were not only more effective but operated at much greater depth than existing systems, allied to more rapid information processing, and improved means of conventional attack on targets deep in the enemy’s rear areas.

The remainder of the 1980s seemed like a helter-skelter ride as one agreement followed after another, particularly following the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and hence leader of the USSR). Progress in many areas of East–West discussions, such as the MBFR and CSCE talks, started to improve, and became even better following the Reagan–Gorbachev meeting in Reykjavik in October 1986, even though that meeting itself did not result in any firm agreements.

The INF Treaty on the reduction of tactical nuclear weapons was signed in December 1987, and the Soviet army began its withdrawal from Afghanistan in May 1988, completing it in February 1989. Also in February 1989 the Soviet Union and all Warsaw Pact members except Romania announced troop reductions as a prelude to the opening of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) talks in Vienna in March. But, far away from these high-level discussions, though inspired by the atmosphere of change they engendered, the people of East Germany were taking matters into their own hands. Thus in the second half of 1989 East Germans started to escape to West Germany via Czechoslovakia, with the Czech government doing virtually nothing to help its Warsaw Pact comrade-in-arms. Then in November the popular pressure on the East German government became intense and, having realized that, on this occasion, they would receive no assistance from the Soviet army, the East German authorities opened the checkpoints in the Berlin Wall. There were many diplomatic formalities to follow, but in essence the Cold War was over and NATO had achieved the aim for which it was founded.

INTERNAL PROCESSES

The perceived threat from the Soviet Union caused the European nations and those of North America to draw together through NATO in a way which had never previously proved possible, even in the face of war. Thus, at the political level, there was regular consultation both through ministerial meetings and through the permanent representatives in Brussels, and, while they always remained sovereign nations, NATO members nevertheless sacrificed a degree of independence through membership of the Alliance. Even the most powerful nation of all, the United States, regularly consulted its NATO colleagues before the rounds of various discussions with the USSR, and as regularly reported on the outcome.

NATO did not have its own parliament, but the 188–member North Atlantic Assembly fulfilled at least some of the tasks of such a body.[3] The Assembly existed outside NATO, was funded by member nations (plus a small grant from NATO itself), and met twice a year, for three days in the spring and five days in the autumn. Its task was to provide a forum where matters of current concern could be discussed by representatives of the national legislative assemblies (government ministers were ineligible for membership), and it then produced two types of document: recommendations, which were sent to the North Atlantic Council urging a particular action, and resolutions, which were sent to member governments and were essentially expressions of opinion.

NATO’s bureaucratic infrastructure was vast. The political and diplomatic International Staff was divided into five divisions, covering political affairs; defence planning and policy; defence support, infrastructure logistics and civil-emergency planning; scientific affairs; and international affairs.

The International Military Staff (IMS) was also large, with tentacles spread throughout the Alliance, most of its tasks being to make plans for war, to provide co-ordination on military matters, and to service a multitude of international committees and working groups. These were the forums at which national representatives provided the views of their defence ministries to NATO and took back the views of the committee or working group to their capitals. The committees and working groups covered a vast range of subjects, ranging from weapons standardization, through data systems inter-operability, to the specifications for the fuel to be used in military aircraft.

NATO also had a variety of executive functions. At NATO Headquarters itself, the IMS divisions covered intelligence; plans and policy; operations; logistics and resources; communications and information systems; and armaments and standardization. There were also a number of bodies responsible for the management of NATO-owned systems, such as the NATO Airborne Early Warning Programme Management Agency (NAPMA), which managed the NATO airborne-early-warning force of E-3A Sentry aircraft at Geilenkirchen in West Germany, the Central European Pipeline Office (CEPO), which managed NATO’s fuel pipeline and storage system, and the NATO Communications and Information Systems Agency (NACISA).

NATO owned and operated several training centres, which included the NATO Defence College in Rome, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) Training Centre at Oberammergau in West Germany, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol School in southern Germany, and the NATO Communication and Information Systems Training Centre at Latina, in Italy. Research facilities included the SACLANT Undersea Research Centre at La Spezia, Italy, and the SHAPE Technical Centre, which provided scientific and technical advice and support to SHAPE from its base in The Hague.

IN SUCH A vast organization which endured over such a long period and was composed of such disparate nations, most of whom had fought each other at least once in the twentieth century, there were inevitably a number of stresses and strains. Never once, however, did they lead to a member leaving the Alliance, either of its own volition or as a result of expulsion.

FRANCE

The most critical of these strains involved France’s departure from the integrated command structure. The reasons for this were grounded in recent French history. France had been totally humiliated by the rapidity with which the German forces overran the country in 1940. These problems were exacerbated by the split between the Vichy government, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, and the Free French, headed by General Charles De Gaulle. Although the latter participated in the Allied successes in 1944–5, it was always as a junior partner to the USA and the UK; but in the final days of the war De Gaulle’s personality was so strong that he managed to secure a French zone of occupation both in western Germany and in Berlin.

Following De Gaulle’s resignation as president in January 1946, France suffered from a succession of governments in the late 1940s, from a substantial degree of antipathy between former Vichyists and those who had served in either the Free French forces or the resistance, and from a powerful Communist party. Despite these problems, the French rebuilt their armed forces rapidly (with substantial aid from the USA and, to a lesser extent, from the UK), and they also reimposed control over their colonial empire.

The French quickly appreciated that, if their country was to regain its position as a Great Power, it had to possess its own atomic-energy programme. The British had come to the same conclusion, but France was in an infinitely worse industrial position than the UK and, unlike the British, its scientists had not been involved in the United States’ Manhattan Project during the war. Nevertheless, the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA) was established as early as October 1945 and, in an essentially civil programme, the first nuclear reactor went critical in December 1948.

The French military monitored CEA’s progress, but it was not until the early 1950s that they began to take a serious interest in building a bomb. Their interest was increased by two events in the middle of the decade. The first of these was the disastrous war in Indo-China, which culminated in the siege of Dien Bien Phu (December 1954 to May 1955), where a remote French garrison was surrounded and cut off by the Communist Viet Minh. With disaster staring them in the face, the French appealed to their American allies for help in the form of a bombing raid against the Viet Minh forces surrounding Dien Bien Phu, preferably involving the use of atomic weapons. Congressional leaders stipulated that they would support such a US operation only if it had British support, but this was not forthcoming, the proposal was dropped, and the French garrison was defeated.

Two years later came the Anglo-French fiasco at Suez, where France was the junior partner in an ill-fated attempt to wrest control of the Suez Canal back from the Egyptians. The two allies drew opprobrium down upon themselves from both the United States and the Soviet Union, and were forced into an ignominious and humiliating retreat.

These two events convinced the French that they must become self-sufficient in defence, develop their own nuclear weapons, and reduce their dependence on allies to the absolute minimum; this led to setting up the Comité des Applications Militaire (CAM) under the CEA in 1956. Matters were proceeding with a fair degree of priority, but when De Gaulle returned to power in May 1958 he gave new impetus to the programme, although the date of the first successful atomic explosion (February 1960) had been set well before his re-election and development of France’s strategic bomber, the Mirage IV, had already been started on 11 April 1958.

Between 1958 and 1962 President De Gaulle made several proposals to both the USA and the UK with a view to enhancing the French role in NATO, but when these were rejected he turned his attention to a ‘French’ solution, which involved the gradual reduction of French participation in NATO’s affairs and which would, as he saw it, liberate France from possible subjection to foreign decisions. Accordingly, in 1966 the French government gave its NATO allies notice that it intended to withdraw its forces from NATO’s integrated command structure and requested that NATO should move all headquarters and installations not under French control from French soil.

This demand involved NATO in considerable expenditure. Numerous headquarters had to be completely uprooted and moved, most of which had been originally located in France either at France’s direct request or to satisfy French sensibilities. Thus, SHAPE moved to Mons in Belgium and Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT) to Brunssum in the Netherlands, while the NATO Defence College moved to Rome.

US armed forces were even more severely affected and were forced to undertake Operation Freloc (France Relocation). Under this, the greater part of the logistic system supporting US forces in Germany had to be reorientated from a west–east axis through the French Atlantic ports to a north–south axis through West German North Sea ports. This not only involved the US in considerable expense but also meant that the supply chain for US forces in the FRG would be much more vulnerable in the event of war. Equally serious was that the US nuclear depots had to be located in West Germany, which meant that if the Warsaw Pact carried out a surprise attack these depots might be overrun before their weapons could be out-loaded. Other elements were moved to the UK, including most of the logistic facilities not moved to West Germany, as well as a number of squadrons of USAF aircraft.

Despite causing all this upheaval, the French most definitely did not leave the Atlantic Alliance, but they were highly selective as to which parts they chose to participate in. Because it remained a member of the Alliance, France took part in the meetings of the North Atlantic Council and played a full part in the Economic Committee, the Council of National Armaments Directors and the Science Committee, among other bodies. Having left the integrated military structure, it no longer participated in top-level bodies such as the Defence Planning Committee, the Military Committee and the Nuclear Planning Group, nor did it contribute to the Military Agency for Standardization or the NATO Integrated Communication System. On the other hand, it still participated in the NATO Air Defence Ground Environment and the Allied Command Europe communications system, known as ACE HIGH, and, by some curious anomaly, it continued to participate in NATO’s civil-defence programmes. The French armed forces established liaison missions with those NATO headquarters with which they might become involved in the event of war, such as Central Army Group (CENTAG) and Northern Army Group (NORTHAG).

The one task to which France remained totally committed was the occupation of Berlin and the arrangements for its defence, where it never wavered for a second in its commitment to the Allied position. It should be noted, however, that everything to do with Berlin was totally outside the NATO structure.

Some elements of the post-1966 French position were quite clear: for example, no NATO units were allowed on French soil without specific permission, nor was there any automatic Allied access to French airspace. Other areas were more ambiguous – perhaps deliberately so. France always maintained that it had total freedom of action where its nuclear forces were concerned and such co-operation as it was prepared to offer concerned only conventional forces.[1] France also maintained that the commitment of French forces could never be assumed, and that any forces committed in support of NATO allies would always remain under French command. Thus, at least in public, it was always open to question as to whether or not the First French Army, located in south-west Germany, would participate in the defence of the Federal Republic.

It was, of course, implied in the ‘no automaticity’ concept that France might have remained aloof from a European conflict, provided there was no perceived threat to French national territory or sovereignty, although this did not exclude action if the approaches to French territory were considered to be under threat. It was a matter of French policy to avoid giving explicit definitions of a variety of terms, including what could be regarded as the country’s ‘vital interests’ and the specific circumstances in which the French government would sanction the use of nuclear weapons.

Unlike the United Kingdom, the French had scarcely any domestic opposition to the possession of nuclear weapons. Even the Socialist François Mitterrand, who in earlier days was, at best, lukewarm about such weapons, became an ardent supporter once he was in power, and during his presidency he did more than any almost any of his predecessors to ensure that France’s force de dissuasion remained strong and up to date. In fact there was a remarkable national consensus on the issue of nuclear weapons, and the French Catholic bishops even published a pastoral letter, in November 1983, in which they declared that nuclear deterrence was totally consistent with the Catholic Church’s doctrine of the ‘just war’. Indeed, they went so far as to state that an argument for ‘peace at any price’ would result in a situation in which the West would not have the means to defend itself, thus effectively encouraging aggression.[2]

It is a splendid contradiction, but it was the very fact of NATO’s existence that enabled France to leave it. Had the Warsaw Pact forces been standing on the other bank of the Rhine, as was the case in 1914 and 1939, then France would perforce have had to seek allies. But the existence of West Germany and its strong buffer of NATO troops on the line of the river Elbe gave France that element of physical security that enabled it to act semi-independently. Further, by holding the Alliance at arm’s length and refusing to commit themselves, instead of being just one among fifteen or sixteen allies, the French were always treated as a special case and were constantly courted by those seeking their support. This especially applied to the question of the First French Army, where both CENTAG and NORTHAG competed for its support as a counter-attack force.

OTHER INTERNAL TENSIONS

NATO proved exceptionally able to contain numerous strains between its members. The Anglo-French attack on the Suez Canal caused considerable debate within the Alliance, as some other members felt very strongly that they should have been consulted, but there were many other tensions. The traditional hostility between Greece and Turkey made their relationship in NATO difficult at the best of times, although matters became even more tense when Turkey invaded northern Cyprus in 1974. There were also numerous disputes between the two countries in the Aegean, both at sea and in the air.

The UK and Iceland were involved in a short, bitter (and ultimately pointless) fisheries dispute (known as the ‘Cod War’) in 1974.

NATO, founded as a bastion of democracy, managed to accommodate a number of military coups d’état among its members. General António Spínola led a military takeover in Portugal in 1974, while in Greece Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos seized control in 1967 and kicked out the king six months later. There was also a mutinous seizure of power by a group of French generals in Algeria in 1956, which almost led to a military coup in Paris.

NATO AND THE HUNGARIAN CRISIS

The Hungarian uprising in 1956 (see Chapter 6) inspired much vocal support in the West, especially from newspapers and American-run radio stations in Europe. This, however, was the limit of the support the Hungarians received, and when the North Atlantic Council convened in December of that year all it could say was that it had:

In other words, NATO did nothing.

NATO AND THE CZECH CRISIS

Although NATO took certain low-level precautionary steps, the Alliance’s reactions to the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis (see Chapter 6) were again mainly vocal. Advance signals of a probable invasion were received in the West for many months before the event. In early May, Western intelligence services, using radio monitoring, aircraft equipped with long-range optical and electronic devices, and satellites, detected signs of troop concentrations on such an ominous scale that the Federal German foreign minister informed the Federal Cabinet and issued a press statement on 22 May. The Warsaw Pact troops conducted an exercise called Böhmerwald in Czechoslovakia, but Western observers then discovered that route signs leading towards the Czechoslovak border and within the country itself had been left in position, and that some of the Soviet troops taking part in the exercise had remained inside Czechoslovakia instead of leaving.

Then in late July a considerable amount of detailed information became available, reporting large troop movements in the southern part of East Germany, in southern Poland, and along those parts of Poland and the USSR bordering on Czechoslovakia. In an effort to try to discover more, USAF SR-71 Blackbird spy planes were brought in from the United States to fly along the line of the Inner German Border to observe the activity up to 100 km beyond the ‘Iron Curtain’. Another valuable intelligence source was the Allied missions to the Soviet commander-in-chief,[3] and the British mission reported on 22 July that the Soviet army’s 71st Artillery Brigade and 6 Motor Rifle Division had completely vacated their usual barracks at Bernau and that an East German army barracks at Halle was similarly empty, while on 29 July one of their patrols saw the Soviet 19 Motor Rifle Division actually deploying from its barracks.^{2}

Even without such classified sources, the Federal German News Service was able to establish that by the end of July some twenty Warsaw Pact divisions were lining the Czech frontiers and that their plan was to drive a wedge straight across the country, with the aim of dividing the fourteen divisions of the Czech army into two.

The evidence of a probable invasion accumulated rapidly, and on 18 August Western radio monitoring units reported that all Warsaw Pact units near the Czechoslovak border had gone on to radio silence – usually an accurate portent that something was about to happen. Then, at 2311 hours precisely on Sunday 20 August, Western radar monitors detected that Prague airspace had suddenly been blanked out on their screens by artificial ‘snow’.[4] The situation was made worse for the West because the whole of eastern Europe was also being protected naturally by a dense and widespread layer of cloud, which could not be penetrated by the sensors aboard US spy satellites.

A major external factor, which affected the US forces in western Europe closely, was the situation in South Vietnam, where the war was at its height; the US armed forces had some 530,000 troops deployed there, and suffered 14,437 deaths during 1968. That year was the year of the Communist Tet offensive (30 January to 29 February), which was subsequently shown to have been a major Communist defeat, but at the time it had a very adverse political and public-relations impact in the United States. Having failed at Tet, the North Vietnamese mounted a second, short-lived, offensive in May, and then a third, which involved attacks all over South Vietnam, on 17 August. That this came just four days before the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia may well have been more than mere coincidence. However, the fact was that in Washington the attention was predominantly on events in Vietnam, while in western Europe many individuals and units had been withdrawn from the US Seventh Army to serve in Indo-China.

NATO appears to have ignored all these warnings; for example, SACEUR (General Lemnitzer) departed to visit exercises two days before the invasion and was in Greece on the day it took place. One possible alternative, supported by unconfirmed rumours at the time, is that the commander of the Warsaw Pact operation, Soviet general I. G. Pavlovsky, warned Western commanders of the forthcoming operation and gave them a believable assurance that there was no hostile intent towards the West.

Even if this report were true, the fact is that some forty Warsaw Pact divisions were on the move; had they simply kept moving and rolled across the Czechoslovak border into the Federal Republic, NATO was in no position to have resisted. NATO troops in western Europe were on the lowest stage of alert, and it would have taken US reinforcements several weeks or more to have reached Europe from the USA, by which time the fighting might well have overrun the airfields they were intending to use.[5]

Publicly at least, the NATO reaction was merely one of words, with the North Atlantic Council, for example, stating in November 1968 that:

Internally, however, NATO carried out a serious and deep analysis of its failings. It revised its crisis-management procedures, both within the organization itself and in the national capitals. It also reviewed its force structure, its force strengths and its mobilization and reinforcement procedures. It also had to face a major change in the Warsaw Pact’s deployments, because a number of Soviet divisions remained in western Czechoslovakia, where there had been none before.

THE SS-20 ISSUE

The INF (intermediate-range nuclear forces) crisis was one of the most important ever to hit NATO. It started in about 1974, when NATO members began to see a steady build-up of a new Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile,[6] the SS-20. This was seen to be a major attempt by the USSR to alter the balance in this field in its favour and thus pose a major threat to western Europe. In consequence, the Alliance reacted with a vigour some had begun to doubt it possessed; indeed, the SS-20 played a key role in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

Intermediate-range nuclear forces had not been a major issue up to that time. NATO itself had deployed some US IRBM systems in Europe between 1959 and 1965, comprising sixty Thors in the UK and sixty Jupiters, thirty of which were based in Italy and thirty in Turkey. Their operational lives were, however, very brief, since all were phased out in 1965: the British Thors because they were sited in the open and were too vulnerable to a Soviet first strike, while the withdrawal of the Jupiters from southern Europe was part of the Cuban Missile Crisis settlement.

The Soviet IRBMs remained, however, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s NATO seemed tacitly to accept the existence of a large number of IRBMs sited in the USSR’s western military districts and clearly targeted on NATO countries. These missiles were of two types, the older being the SS-4, which entered service in 1957 and carried a single 1 MT warhead,[7] while the SS-5 entered service in 1961 in two versions: Mod 1, with a single 1 MT warhead, and Mod 3, with three 300 kT warheads. Most of these were deployed in missile fields just to the east of the Soviet–Polish border, and at their peak in the late 1960s some 700 were in service, reducing to approximately 400 in the mid-1970s. The SS-4 had a range of some 2,000 km, while that of the SS-5 was 4,100 km, which enabled both missiles to cover the whole of western Europe, although their relative inaccuracy (the SS-4 had a CEP (see Chapter 7) of 2.4 km, while that of the SS-5 was 1 km) meant that they could be targeted only against cities or other area targets.

The existence of two new missiles, the SS-16 and the SS-20, became known in the West in the late 1960s. Both could be launched either from silos or from wheeled transporter–erector–launcher (TEL) vehicles, but there was an even more significant relationship between the two, since they shared two identical missile stages. The SS-20 was a two-stage missile with a range of 5,000 km and carrying three 150 kT warheads with an accuracy (CEP) of 400 m. The SS-16 carried a single 1 MT warhead and was essentially an SS-20 with an additional third stage, giving it a range of 9,000 km. This range meant that the SS-16 was classified as an ICBM and was covered by the SALT treaty, whereas the SS-20 was an IRBM and thus was not covered by SALT.

The SS-20 was road-mobile, using a single twelve-wheeled TEL vehicle, housed in a purpose-built shelter with a split roof which could be opened to allow the missile to be launched. Later, when they signed the INF Treaty in December 1987, the Soviets admitted that they had deployed 650 SS-20 missiles, plus a further forty-two for training. These had been operated by ten missile divisions: six in the western USSR and four in Asia. These divisions included forty-eight regiments, each with its own operating base, which included a number of individual missile shelters with a number of pre-surveyed launch sites in the surrounding area.

These two missiles posed three problems for NATO. US concern centred on the fact that it would be possible for the Soviet Union to manufacture two-stage missiles (i.e. SS-20s) and, quite separately, to also manufacture and store third stages. The verification measures then under discussion would not have been able to differentiate between them, meaning, so the US argued, that at a time of crisis it would be possible to bring these two elements together to create SS-16 ICBMs and thus directly threaten the USA. Following intense discussions in the SALT II negotiations, the agreement included the termination of both testing and deployment of SS-16s.

As a separate issue, however, the SS-20 posed a new and serious threat to western Europe: first, its launcher was highly mobile and thus difficult to detect and destroy; second, it had three accurate MIRV warheads, which could be targeted against military targets; and, third, it increased the number of Soviet warheads from some 400-odd on SS-4s and SS-5s to 1,950 on 650 SS-20s.

To deal with this threatening situation, and in an attempt to avert an arms race in Europe, in 1979 NATO agreed on two new approaches to the problem. It decided, first:

In parallel with this, however, in what was known as the ‘twin-track’ approach, NATO ministers also:

The diplomatic track included three major offers to the USSR: a reduction in strategic-nuclear-force levels within the SALT framework, and new initiatives in both the MBFR and the CSCE processes. The military track involved fielding ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing IIs.

The timing of the problem coincided with a general resurgence of public concern in Western countries over defence matters. This involved increased interest in some countries, but there were also small but highly vocal groups which were opposed to most forms of defence and to nuclear weapons in particular. When they found themselves faced with Soviet rejection of the ‘diplomatic’ element of the ‘twin-track’ approach, NATO members were therefore faced with a difficult choice. But, despite many predictions that they would lack the nerve, they went ahead and authorized the fielding of the new counter-systems in 1983.^{6} The greatest opposition came from Denmark, where the parliament not only voted against deployment of Pershing II or GLCMs there, but also voted to withhold that element of Denmark’s contribution to NATO which would have gone towards the infrastructure costs of such missiles. In the UK there were repeated demonstrations against deployment of GLCMs in southern England, but the government brushed these aside. Helmut Schmidt, the West German chancellor, faced greater resistance from within his own Social Democratic Party than from the official opposition and threatened to resign if the parliamentary vote went against him. (He won the vote on 26 May 1981.)

Despite the opposition, US-operated GLCMs began to arrive in western Europe in November 1983, whereupon the Soviet Union withdrew from the INF Treaty negotiations in Geneva. Several weeks later it also effectively withdrew from the SALT and MBFR talks, as well.

NATO’s response to the Soviet threat posed by the SS-20 centred on the BGM-109 GLCM, a Mach 0.7[8] missile which carried a variable-yield nuclear warhead (10–50 kT) over ranges up to 2,500 km. It flew at very low altitude, using a computer-controlled navigation system, and was extremely accurate, with a CEP of some 30 m. Four missiles were carried on a single TEL and were launched at an angle of 45 degrees. In this demonstration of NATO solidarity in the face of the SS-20 threat, no less than 116 launchers (464 missiles) were deployed to Europe, starting in November 1983 and with deployment completed in 1988. The bases were in Belgium (12 launchers), Germany (24), Italy (28), the Netherlands (12) and the UK (40).

The other element of the NATO deployment was the Pershing II missile. The Pershing IA had been deployed in West Germany since the 1960s, with 108 operated by the US army and 72 by the West German air force.[9] The Pershing IA had a maximum range of 740 km and carried a 400 kT nuclear warhead with an accuracy (CEP) of 400 m. The Pershing II used the same launcher and appeared generally similar, but was quite different internally. The main difference was in its warhead, which not only was much more accurate (with a CEP of 45 m), but had a special ‘earth penetrator’ which could drive through most types of soil to a depth of some 30 m before detonating its 250 kT nuclear weapon, thus destroying most types of command bunker. This warhead, coupled with its range of 1,500 km, posed a major threat to Soviet and Warsaw Pact buried headquarters, including those in the western military districts of the USSR.

It appeared that the Soviet authorities thought that the West would not have the nerve, solidarity or popular support necessary to achieve these deployments, because they continued with their SS-20 programme, which by late 1985 had reached a total of 441 launchers with 1,323 warheads.^{7} When General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko died in March 1985, however, he was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, and the atmosphere immediately began to change. Diplomatic progress became more rapid, and in December 1987 the INF Treaty was signed, under which not only would 670 Soviet missiles (including 405 SS-20s) and 400 US systems be withdrawn and destroyed, but the whole destruction programme would be subject to on-site verification by the opposite side.

The treaty laid down a three-year period for the elimination of all intermediate-range weapons and launchers (GLCM, Pershing, SS-20, SS-12 and SS-4), in two phases: deployed warheads were to be reduced to 180 on each side within twenty-nine months, with total elimination after three years; shorter-range nuclear weapons were to be totally eliminated within eighteen months. The treaty also included on-site inspections between twenty and ninety days after signature, to verify numbers, with further inspections up to the year 2000.

FROM ITS INCEPTION NATO was involved in delicate juggling acts to balance a frequently bewildering variety of requirements. The overriding aim was to field forces which would deter an attack by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, since anything else the Alliance attempted was wasted if it could not achieve that. But this had to be balanced against what was both politically acceptable and economically affordable to the members – requirements which were not always mutually compatible. Then, too, the command structure needed to share out the posts to achieve a balance between the United States, which was not only the most powerful single member but also met a very large proportion of the bills, and the remaining nations, who wished to ensure that their national aspirations were seen to be met. Finally, the organization as a whole needed to present a good public image, and to produce solutions which would not offend public opinion in any member nation too greatly.

At the top of the military organization was the Military Committee, on which all nations were represented by their chiefs-of-staff and which normally met three times a year.[1] Since the chiefs-of-staff were based in their national capitals, there was a need for some permanent representation at NATO Headquarters to conduct day-to-day business, and this was originally provided by the Standing Group, which consisted of just three members – France, the UK and the USA – with all other nations except Iceland appointing a ‘permanent national liaison officer’. The title of the group changed to the ‘Military Representatives Committee’ in 1950, and to the ‘Military Committee in Permanent Session’ in 1957. When France withdrew from the integrated military structure in 1966 this top-level body was reorganized again, being expanded to include a permanent ‘national military representative’ at three-star level (i.e. lieutenant-general or equivalent) from all nations except France and Iceland, although the title remained unchanged.[2]

Originally, the chairmanship of the Military Committee in Chiefs-of-Staff Session rotated annually between members, but a separate chairman of the Military Committee in Permanent Session was appointed in 1958, and from 1963 onwards the same officer chaired both committees. Designated the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, this officer was in effect the senior military officer in NATO, and since the post was created in 1958 he has always been a European, thus balancing the US influence in other senior posts in the Alliance.[3]

THE COMMANDS

On the establishment of NATO, a series of regional planning groups (RPGs) was set up, each comprising those nations with a strategic interest in the particular area:

• Canada/US RPG – Canada, USA;

• Western Europe RPG – Benelux, Canada, France, UK, USA;

• North Atlantic Ocean RPG – Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, UK, USA;

• Northern Europe RPG – Denmark, Norway, UK, USA;

• Southern Europe/Western Mediterranean RPG – France, Italy, UK, USA.

These RPGs were not, however, the only forums where discussions were taking place, and there were a number of bilateral links, of which by far the most important was that between the United States and the United Kingdom. These two countries not only had strong traditional and cultural ties, but also had forged a close alliance during the war under the Allied Combined Chiefs-of-Staff (CCS) organization. This CCS mechanism continued to be used after the war, and during 1945–9 it produced a variety of combined war plans to counter possible Soviet aggression. The link continued with the setting-up of NATO, and was used by them, as the two predominant military powers in the new organization, for private discussions on the command arrangements for the Alliance.[4]

The RPGs produced a variety of organizational proposals, but, despite external pressures such as the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the Communist takeover in China and the outbreak of the Korean war, the discussions dragged on through the whole of 1950 and 1951, and it was not until early 1952 that a full structure was in place.

Naturally, a hierarchy of command appointments were needed, and these were designated as follows:

• major NATO commands (MNCs) – the most senior appointments, at four-star level, normally designated ‘Supreme Allied Commander…’ (SAC); e.g. SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe);

• principal subordinate commands (PSCs) – the next level down, headed by a commander-in-chief (CINC) at either three- or four-star level; e.g. CINCENT (Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Central Europe);

• major subordinate commands (MSCs) – these were usually at four-star level, headed by a commander; e.g. COMCENTAG (Commander Central Army Group).[5]

It was clear that one supreme allied commander would be required for Europe (SACEUR), that he would be an American, and that he should be the most prestigious military officer of the day. Thus, General Dwight D. Eisenhower took up this appointment on 2 April 1951, with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the British former military head of the Western Union Defence Organization (Brussels Treaty) forces, as his deputy. They established Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) at Fontainebleau in France, and quickly agreed on a command structure, which was in place in November 1951. This consisted of:

• Allied Land Forces Central Europe (AFCENT) – a four-star land command covering Benelux, France and West Germany;

• Allied Air Forces Central Europe (AIRCENT) – a four-star air command, covering the same geographical area as AFCENT;

• Allied Forces Northern Europe (AFNORTH) – a four-star, joint (i.e. navy, army, air force) command, covering Denmark and Norway;

• Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH) – a four-star joint command, covering Italy and the western Mediterranean, and including the US Sixth Fleet;

• Flag Officer Western Europe (FOWE) – who provided naval representation to SHAPE, but commanded only the French, UK and US Rhine flotillas.

It was, however, significant that the British refused to place the land or air defences of the United Kingdom under NATO. As a result, the land defence of the UK remained a national responsibility throughout the Cold War, although, as will be discussed later, the air defence eventually did become a NATO responsibility.

If SACEUR’s demesne was agreed without much disagreement, the same cannot be said of the Atlantic, where the two basic issues were the subdivisions of the command and the fact that both the Americans and the British wanted to provide the sea-going commander. The matter was not just a question of national prestige, however: it also included important factors of wartime strategy, with the United States being concerned about troops and supply convoys crossing the Atlantic in a west–east direction in war, while British concerns centred on south–north trade routes, including that for oil. Many meetings were held and a large number of alternative plans were discussed, with the naval discussions not being helped when the issue entered the British political arena in 1951, with Churchill, at that time the leader of the opposition, attacking the socialist government (led by Clement Attlee) for agreeing to a US officer as SACLANT. The problem was also complicated by disagreements over command in the Mediterranean and in the southern part of NATO’s Atlantic area, which had already been designated IBERLANT.

In the autumn of 1951 a British general election put the problem on hold, and when Churchill again became prime minister, on 26 October, the question of NATO naval commands featured high on his list of priorities. Churchill went to Washington in January 1952, and after a round of fierce arguments he eventually gave way, although a British admiral was to be appointed Deputy SACLANT. The principle agreed, the navy planners then set up a complicated organizational system which involved numerous situations where an officer held two appointments (known as ‘double-hatting’) or even three (‘triple-hatting’), although the problems inherent in such an arrangement were alleviated by having separate staffs for the various functions.

The problems did not go away, however, and among the knotty issues was the question of the US navy’s aircraft carriers. The control of atomic weapons aboard these carriers was governed by the US McMahon Act, which stipulated that control could not be passed to another power, and this raised a major hurdle when the US Navy’s Strike Fleet Atlantic (STRIKE-FLTLANT) was operating in the Eastern Atlantic area, where the NATO commander was Commander-in-Chief Eastern Atlantic (CINCEASTLANT), a British officer. There were also problems over IBERLANT, which were eventually solved by placing Commander IBERLANT, a British officer, under CINCEASTLANT.

After much argument, the naval organization in the Atlantic settled down in late 1952:

• SACLANT (US) and his deputy (UK) were in the headquarters at Norfolk, Virginia;

• STRIKEFLTLANT remained under the command of SACLANT, regardless of its position in the Atlantic;

• CINCWESTLANT (US) exercised command over most of the northern Atlantic, with two sub-area commands: US Atlantic Sub-Area and Canadian Sub-Area;

• CINCEASTLANT (UK) controlled four geographical sub-areas – Central (UK), Northern (UK), Biscay (French) and IBERLANT (UK) – with a fifth functional command (Commander Submarines Eastern Atlantic (COMSUBEASTLANT)), being a British officer.

One notable difference between the American and other command systems concerned the air. Under the US system the naval commander controlled all his air assets, since the US navy had assumed responsibility for long-range maritime patrol aircraft from the (then) US Army Air Force in 1943. Under the British and French systems, however, land-based air support was provided by the air force, as a result of which there were two commanders of equal rank – one navy, one air force – at EASTLANT and at the geographical sub-areas.

Similar difficulties faced the planners in the Mediterranean. The British had considerable interests here: they regarded the sea lines of communication (SLOC) as vital to their wartime requirements; they were strongly involved in Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and Egypt; and they had a predominant interest in the security of the Suez Canal. They had also, as they pointed out, been the predominant naval power in the region for some 150 years, and maintained a sizeable Mediterranean Fleet, based in Malta. The French also had strong interests here, since they had colonial ties with Morocco and Tunisia, while Algeria was legally a département of France, and they needed to secure the north–south SLOC to metropolitan France. The US Sixth Fleet was permanently based in the Mediterranean, but, since it carried atomic weapons, its command, was subject to the McMahon Act. Italy also had a major interest, as the largest power bordering the Mediterranean and with a rapidly growing navy. Allied to all this was a totally new factor – the imminent entry of Greece and Turkey into the Atlantic Alliance, with a concomitant need to accommodate the geographically adjacent but traditionally hostile countries into the command structure.

A further and novel factor was added to the situation when the British posted Admiral Earl Mountbatten as commander-in-chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet. This was seen as slightly underhand by some Americans, although it was part of such a senior officer’s normal career progression. Nevertheless, the British could not deny that such a thrusting, charismatic and successful officer – he had previously served as Supreme Allied Commander South-East Asia Command from 1943 to 1945, as viceroy of India in 1947 and as governor-general of India in 1947–8 – might not have some influence on the situation.

A series of plans was proposed by the tri-national Standing Group at NATO Headquarters, by SACEUR and by the various nations involved, but every one of them met with a fundamental objection from one or several of the parties concerned. Eventually, however, a compromise was reached in which:

• Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Mediterranean (CINCAFMED) (UK) reported direct to SACEUR;

• geographical subordinates were Gibraltar (GIBMED) (UK), Occidentale (MEDOC) (French), Central (MEDCENT) (Italian), South-East (MEDSOUEAST) (UK), Eastern (MEDEAST) (Greek), and North-Eastern (MEDNOREAST) (Turkish);

• there were also three functional commands: US Patrols Mediterranean (USPATMED) (US),[6] Submarines Mediterranean (SUBMED) (UK) and Submarines North-East (SUBMEDNOREAST) (Turkey).

Admiral Mountbatten duly set up his NATO headquarters in Malta in December 1952,[7] but without STRIKEFORSOUTH – the US Sixth Fleet – which remained under CINCAFSOUTH, an American four-star officer with his headquarters in Naples, Italy.

These examples from the very early days of NATO show one of the underlying strengths of the Alliance: not that bureaucratic conflicts – which might today be termed ‘star wars’ – were avoided, but that they were always resolved. It would have been too much to expect that the various national susceptibilities would not have resulted in some bruising discussions, but somehow the will was always there to find a solution.

The organization did not, of course, remain static: it changed to meet altered circumstances in national organizations and to match political and military developments within the Alliance. Thus the national ‘share’ of appointments had to be adjusted to include the Germans in 1955, again in 1966 to cover the departure of the French, and yet again in 1982 to accommodate Spain, although Spain did not enter the integrated command structure.

In the late 1960s two events increased yet further the importance of the UK to the Alliance. The first was the move of many USAF air bases from France to the UK as a result of General De Gaulle’s diktat; the second was the adoption in 1967 of the strategy of ‘flexible response’. As a result the British Isles became of major significance as a base for offensive and defensive operations, and their security became a matter of great concern to the Alliance. A new NATO command was therefore established on 10 April 1975, when Commander UK Air Forces (CINCUKAIR) took post at High Wycombe, England. CINCUKAIR was ‘double-hatted’ as Commander-in-Chief RAF Strike Command, and, although only a major subordinate commander (MSC), he reported directly to SACEUR.[8] This brought British airspace firmly under NATO’s control in war, but failed to cause the sort of political and public reactions which had made the decisions on the naval commands in the Atlantic and Mediterranean so difficult in the 1950s.

When NATO was set up there were two principal subordinate commands (PSCs) on the Continent: Land Forces Central Europe and Air Forces Central Europe. The air-force headquarters was subsequently disbanded, but was resurrected in 1975 as Allied Air Forces Central Europe (AAFCE), although a directive by NATO’s Defence Planning Committee that it should be moved from Ramstein in southern Germany and collocated with AFCENT at Brunssum was successfully resisted by the air forces until well past the end of the Cold War.^{1}

Physical moves were also made. As has already been described, the French decision to leave the integrated military structure also involved a large-scale movement of NATO facilities from France to Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. For different reasons HQ IBERLANT was transferred from Gibraltar to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1966, and HQ Allied Naval Forces Southern Europe (NAVSOUTH) from Malta to Naples in 1971.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

As an alliance involving numerous capitals and many major military headquarters spread over a wide geographical area, NATO was worth little if all these could not communicate with each other over routine matters, in crises, when implementing contingency plans and, ultimately, in war. Great emphasis was therefore placed on telecommunications systems, which, in the 1950s and 1960s, and in keeping with the technology of the times, were provided primarily by a huge network of landlines leased from the various PTTs,[9] combined with a number of point-to-point radio links.

This resulted in a somewhat fragmented and haphazard system, and the next step was to bring this under control, which resulted in a NATO-wide communications system linking NATO Headquarters in Brussels with the capitals of all the member nations and to each of the major NATO commanders. The requirement for this system – designated the NATO Integrated Communications System (NICS) – was identified in 1965; the system was approved in 1971 and entered service in manageable segments from the mid-1970s onwards, becoming the largest infrastructure-funded project[10] undertaken by the Alliance, having been estimated to have cost some £500 million by 1985.

The backbone of the NICS was provided by a number of different communications systems, of which the most dramatic were based on satellites. Indeed, NATO was one of the earliest major organizations to use satellites, thus refuting the widely held image of its being a slow-reacting organization which was almost always behind the times. NATO first trialled mobile ground stations operating to a US satellite in a system known as NATO I in the 1960s, and then the Alliance’s first wholly owned satellites were launched in 1970–71 (the NATO II programme), followed by four more in 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1984 (NATO III).[11] The ground elements comprised two transportable earth stations in NATO I, twelve static earth stations in NATO II, and twenty-one static and a number of mobile stations (for use in contingency plans) in NATO III.

These telecommunications systems provided numerous facilities for the Alliance, including fully automated telephone and telegraph systems covering the entire NATO area, but there were many other systems at lower levels, one example being the Allied Command Europe’s ACE HIGH system, which was installed in the late 1950s to provide the circuits necessary to carry alert messages and to provide the links necessary to enable SACEUR to implement his ‘tripwire’ retaliation strike plan. The backbone of the system comprised forty-nine long-range radio links, with a further forty line-of-sight microwave links providing access into national systems. The system extended from northern Norway through central Europe to eastern Turkey, and, while NATO controlled the overall system, each nation was responsible for providing the manpower and administrative support for the stations within its boundaries.[12] In addition, both MNCs had their own signal groups – e.g. the Central Region Signals Group (CRSG), which served AFCENT – to provide NATO telecommunications.

There were two significant features of these large communications networks. First, the commitment of large sums of money indicated the extent to which the nations relied on the Alliance. Second, the multinational manning of the units providing the system showed that soldiers, sailors and airmen of the different nations could work together both efficiently and amicably at unit level.

IT IS SCARCELY surprising that in the early post-war years the Russians, and through them the remainder of the Soviet Union, should have been apprehensive at the prospect of a rearmed Germany. They had been invaded three times from the west in the previous forty years, and the German occupation had not been a pleasant experience. Then, in the aftermath of victory in 1945, Stalin thought he perceived the rise of yet another anti-Soviet coalition, led by the Unites States, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, and – at that time – the sole possessor of the atomic bomb.

Stalin therefore set about creating a Soviet-controlled bloc in eastern Europe, which, by combining a series of ‘class brothers’, would form a protective shield for the USSR. Accordingly, the defence arrangements of each of these countries were linked to the USSR in a series of bilateral treaties which were imposed on each of them in turn, while their armed forces were trained in the Soviet manner and armed with a mixture of outdated Soviet equipment (including US and British equipment supplied under Lend-Lease) and captured German stocks. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, an ethnic Pole who had risen to the highest ranks in the Red Army, was appointed minister of national defence in Poland in 1949, and other Soviet officers were placed in similar positions of responsibility in other ‘satellite’ armies.

The formation of NATO in 1949 undoubtedly came as a shock to the Soviet Union, but little was changed in the Soviet-bloc military arrangements until the death of Stalin in 1953. The new leadership then placed the forces of the Soviet Union and the satellites on a much more organized basis, and was looking for some overall co-ordinating vehicle when the Western powers decided to admit a rearmed Federal Republic of Germany first to the Western European Union and then to NATO.

The latter event spurred a quick reaction from the Soviet leadership, and on 14 May 1955 a conference was held at Warsaw, where Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union joined together to form the ‘Warsaw Pact’. The members’ commitment was set out in Article 4:

At the diplomatic level, establishing the Warsaw Pact achieved a number of significant Soviet goals. The pact was publicized, in the first instance, as a direct reaction to the admission of West Germany to NATO by a group of nations who had every reason to fear German rearmament. On the diplomatic and propaganda fronts, however, it also established a treaty organization in eastern Europe which paralleled NATO in the west, and, as was to be seen, it also led the USSR to believe that it had a legitimate right to exercise control over the countries of eastern Europe.

The Warsaw Pact agreement itself did not cover the stationing of Soviet forces in non-Soviet countries; this was subsequently the subject of separate bilateral treaties signed later (and amended from time to time):

• Czechoslovakia – there was no treaty originally, as there were no Soviet troops stationed there, but one was signed on 16 October 1968 following the suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’;

• East Germany (GDR) – 12 March 1957;

• Hungary – 27 May 1957;

• Poland – 17 December 1956;

• Romania – April 1957;

• Albania and Bulgaria had no Soviet forces stationed on their territory and did not require an agreement.

The signatories of the Warsaw Pact went on to establish a joint command of their armed forces, although the participation of the East German armed forces in the joint command was not included in the original treaty, possibly because they were already a virtually integral part of the Soviet forces stationed in their territory. Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact forces was absolute, and the commander-in-chief was always a Soviet army officer, with his headquarters in Moscow.[2] The deputy commander-in-chief and the chief of the Joint Staff were also Soviet officers, as were the three deputies who served as commanders-in-chief for the joint naval, air and air defence forces.

The highest elements of non-Soviet national representation within the military framework were the various ministers of national defence (all military officers, on the Soviet model), who ranked as deputy commanders-in-chief. But, to ensure compliance with Soviet requirements yet further, Soviet officers, usually of colonel-general rank, were integrated into the defence ministries in each of the Pact countries, under the title ‘senior representative of the commander-in-chief’.

The suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising was a purely Soviet affair, but the operation had a substantial effect on the Warsaw Pact. Viewing this in conjunction with earlier actions against riots in East Berlin and Poland, it was clear to the ‘northern tier’ of countries (Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland) that, unless the leadership policies in the Soviet Union changed dramatically, they would never be allowed any significant independence from Moscow. On the other hand, Moscow was pressed into making some meaningful accommodations, including revisions to the bilateral treaties on the stationing of troops, while the numerous senior Soviet officers who had been imposed on many of the satellite armies since the end of the war were at last removed and returned to the USSR.

Further changes to the Warsaw Pact, which had been under discussion for some years, were implemented following the suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968. These included the creation of a Council of Ministers of National Defence and of a Military Council, and the reorganization of the higher staffs to include greater representation from non-Soviet countries. There was also an increase in the number of personnel exchanges between the various armed forces. Above all, however, there was evidence of a greater willingness on the part of the Soviet officers to be more co-operative with their partners in the Pact and to work together more closely. Nevertheless, and despite pressure from countries such as Romania, the most senior posts remained firmly in Soviet hands, although it could be argued that, while NATO included many non-US posts at the second-tier level, the top command posts such as SACLANT, SACEUR and Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Southern Europe (CINCSOUTH) remained equally firmly in US hands.

Although the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact armed forces used predominantly Soviet equipment, some nationally designed and developed equipment was produced. All member countries used Soviet tanks and combat aircraft, for example, but Czechoslovakia produced much of its own artillery, while Polish shipyards produced landing ships not only for Poland’s navy but for the Soviet navy as well. Soviet strategy and Soviet military doctrine remained supreme, however, which gave rise to discontent in the higher echelons of the national armies and in the national governments, who felt that they had no control over the missions likely to be undertaken by their national armies. There were periodic moves to place a non-Soviet general as commander-in-chief of the Pact forces, particularly when Marshal I. I. Yakubovsky died in post in 1976, but these never came to anything.

The Warsaw Pact also embraced a number of non-military organizations. Such bodies included the Technical and Scientific Committee, set up in 1969 to co-ordinate military and civil research, and the Committee of Foreign Ministers, which was established in 1976.

One significant feature which differentiated the Warsaw Pact from NATO was that at no time during the Cold War did the Soviet Union ever provide atomic or nuclear weapons to the other members of the Pact.

Despite the overwhelming power of the Soviet Union and the tight grip it imposed on its ‘satellites’, the Warsaw Pact suffered from repeated internal problems. Also, unlike NATO, the military forces of the Pact were used on at least one occasion to bring recalcitrant members back into line.

HUNGARY: 1956

There were riots in East Berlin in June 1953 and in Poznán, Poland, in June 1956, both of which were put down by direct intervention by Soviet troops. These were, however, fairly localized affairs, but the Hungarian revolt in 1956 was a nationwide event, and its brutal repression by the Soviet Union was a turning point for both the Soviet Union and NATO.

Hungary had fought on the German side in the Second World War and was overrun by the Soviet army in 1944. Elections then established a coalition government, but with a substantial Communist minority. The Hungarian Communists then followed a similar pattern to that of their ‘socialist comrades’ in the other satellites and steadily removed their opponents until they won the next elections in 1949, principally because there were no other candidates. The Communists, headed by Secretary-General Mátyás Rákosi, then implemented the usual policies of collectivization of farms and rapid expansion of industry, thus sowing the seeds for their ultimate defeat.

In the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953 Rákosi was instructed by the Soviet leadership to install Imre Nagy as prime minister, but after a short period in office Nagy suffered a heart attack in 1955 and had to be replaced.

The situation in Hungary deteriorated rapidly in early 1956, largely due to a general feeling of discontent with Communist rule, to which there were four contributory factors. First, there was a widespread feeling that the leadership itself was irresolute and uncertain as to the way forward, and Hungarian dissidents had taken heart from a visit by Soviet leaders to Yugoslavia in June 1955, which appeared to accord an air of respectability to Tito’s form of nationalist Communism, independent of Soviet control, and from Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization initiative in January 1956. Second, due to the ineptitude so frequently displayed by Communist regimes, the economy was manifestly failing. Third, Soviet armed suppression of the Polish revolt in Poznań encouraged Rákosi to take even more repressive measures in Hungary, but a visit to Budapest by Soviet Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan in July 1956 resulted in a shake-up of the government, with the deeply hated Rákosi being dismissed and replaced by Erno Gero. Finally, even further encouragement to the dissidents came in October 1956, when widespread unrest in Poland resulted in a relatively popular figure, Władysław Gomułka, being released from jail (he had been found guilty of ‘Titoism’) and appointed as first secretary.

This was taken as a signal that a national form of Communism would be acceptable to the Soviet leadership, and a student rally in Budapest on 22 October produced a fourteen-point manifesto demanding a similar system for Hungary. Next day a rally in support of the Poles started peacefully but got out of hand in the evening when an aggressive speech on the radio by Rákosi led to a confrontation between the crowd and the AVH (state security police), who eventually shot into the crowd.

Revolutionary councils immediately sprang up all over the country, advocating three policies: nationalism, neutrality and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Soviet leadership, which regarded Hungary as an essential element of its defensive strategy, was alarmed, while the Hungarian Politburo tried to cover all eventualities by calling for Soviet troops and also reappointing the ailing Nagy as prime minister, even though he was opposed to Soviet intervention. When the Soviet tanks began to roll into Budapest in the early hours of 24 October they only made matters much worse, and a number were quickly destroyed by petrol bombs. Two representatives of the Soviet Politburo, Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, visited Budapest on 24–26 October and swept the Communist old guard aside, confirming Nagy’s appointment and replacing Gero by János Kádár. Nagy announced his new government on 27 October, the Soviet tanks left on 29 October, and Mikoyan and Suslov returned to Budapest on the 30th to announce that Hungarian sovereignty would be respected.

This Soviet activity was in reality an elaborate camouflage, however, and military forces were massing for the invasion. But at this point external events intervened. On 29 October the Israelis attacked Egypt, and the British and French governments issued an ultimatum to the two sides to withdraw from the Suez Canal and sent an amphibious task force from Cyprus and Malta (30 October). This diverted world attention from events in Hungary, and the Soviet army used some 250,000 troops and 2,500 armoured vehicles to surround Budapest on 1 November. After apparently granting concessions (whose only purpose was to give its troops time to ‘shake out’ into battle order), the Soviet Union struck at midnight on 3/4 November.

Budapest then became a violent and bloody battlefield as Hungarian freedom fighters tried to destroy the Soviet tanks and to kill or demoralize the Soviet troops. But, despite showing great courage and exhibiting considerable ingenuity in their methods of attack, the Hungarians were slowly but inexorably beaten by the organized might of the Soviet army. The main fighting was over by 14 November, and all resistance had crumbled by 30 November. About 25,000 Hungarians and 7,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed in the fighting, but the result was a foregone conclusion.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1968

The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 exhibited precisely what was meant by the new Brezhnev doctrine of ‘Socialist Commonwealth’. In the aftermath of the Second World War the Czechoslovak people as a whole were grateful to the Soviet army for their liberation from German occupation, while many still retained bitter memories of being ‘sold down the river’ by Britain and France in the Munich Agreement of 1938. As a result, the long-established Communist Party did well in the 1946 elections and took part in the subsequent coalition, providing the prime minister and the minister of police. Unlike in most other countries of eastern Europe, the Soviet army did not retain any troops in Czechoslovakia once the Germans had been defeated.

The Communists gradually expanded their influence, and from February 1948 they provided an uninspiring and inefficient government for some twenty years, but growing popular unrest resulted in the appointment in January 1968 of Alexander Dubček as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

Dubček promised reforms, especially of the political and education systems, and this, coupled with the suspension of censorship and a rapidly increasing Western influence, resulted in a euphoric period known as the ‘Prague Spring’. These developments were, however, viewed with considerable disfavour by the other Eastern-bloc leaders, particularly those in East Germany and the USSR, who saw the events in Czechoslovakia not only as a major strategic threat to the Warsaw Pact, but also, if the freedom virus were to prove infectious, as a challenge to their own positions. The only exception was Romania, which not only gave vocal support for the ‘Czechoslovak experiment’ and resolutely declined to become involved in any concerted action, but also signed a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with Czechoslovakia in the week preceding the eventual invasion.

The Soviet leaders, instead of going it alone, as they had done in Hungary, made extensive use of the Warsaw Pact consultative machinery, initially in an endeavour to find a non-violent solution. Thus a Pact meeting in Warsaw in June resulted in a formal letter of warning being sent to the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party. This was followed by a meeting between the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party and the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in late July, and the crisis then appeared to have been defused.

Meanwhile, however, the Soviets had also been using the Pact machinery to plan co-ordinated military action, in which East German, Hungarian, Polish and Soviet units would all take part. Several major Warsaw Pact exercises were held in the summer of 1968 – far more than had been the case in the previous few years, which should have been seen as a classic signal of an imminent invasion. In any invasion, the major problems for commanders and their staffs are command-and-control, telecommunications and logistics, together with transport, movement control and supplies. The first overt exercise, called Böhmerwald, involving Soviet, Czech, East German and Polish troops, was a command-post and telecommunications exercise which took place from 20 to 30 June in Czechoslovakia and was a none too subtle warning to the Czechoslovak leadership. More ominous, however, was the major logistics exercise (Nyemen) held between 23 July and 10 August. This included calling up reservists in the four western Soviet republics, and led immediately into another command-post, telecommunications and air-defence exercise (‘Skyshield’) between 11 and 20 August. This was clearly meant to cover the assembly and ‘shaking out’ of the Soviet, East German and Polish troops taking part in the invasion, since it led straight into the invasion itself on the night of 20 August, which was a Sunday and traditionally the time of least resistance to military force.

Just after 2300 on 20 August a Soviet spetsnaz (special forces) battalion landed at Prague Airport and took it over with great speed. This was closely followed by 103 Guards Airborne Division, which flew in and then raced into the city to take over the vital points. Meanwhile the ground troops rolled over the border:

• The Soviet 1st Army,[3] normally stationed in East Germany and consisting of four Soviet divisions and the East German 11 Motorized Infantry Division, headed south. It passed through Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), Márianské Lánzĕ (Marienbad) and Plzeň (Pilsen) until the leading elements had reached České Budĕjovice (Budweis), where they halted and faced westward, sealing off Czechoslovakia’s border with the Federal Republic of Germany and covering any possible reaction by NATO.

• The Soviet 20th Army, consisting of four Soviet divisions and the East German 7 Armoured Division, headed along two axes from Poland and East Germany. The two columns joined up outside Prague and then moved into the city, where they relieved the 103 Guards Airborne Division.

• A Polish army of four divisions entered the country from the north, between Hradec Králové and Ostrava.

• Two Hungarian divisions, with Soviet units in support, moved northward into the south of the country.

• Five Soviet divisions moved into eastern Czechoslovakia from southern Poland and the western USSR.

• Some twenty air regiments of the Soviet 24th Air Army occupied all the airfields in the country.[4]

The whole operation consisted of three phases. In the first, some twenty Warsaw Pact divisions totalling some 250,000 men, complete with their associated weapons and supplies, invaded Czechoslovakia from north, south and east, occupying all places of any strategic significance. The second phase, concurrent with the first, involved the movement of ten Soviet divisions from the western Soviet military districts into the positions in East Germany and Poland vacated by the Soviet divisions that had invaded Czechoslovakia. In the third phase, many of the divisions that had invaded Czechoslovakia in the first phase redeployed to the western end of the country, facing the border with the Federal Republic of Germany, in an area previously occupied by Czechoslovak divisions. The net result was that the Soviet Union had not only restored its control over Czechoslovakia, but had also greatly strengthened its front line against NATO. From a purely military perspective, it was a masterly manoeuvre.

The Czechoslovak people and their national army were completely defeated by this use of overpowering force. The Czech population was united in its opposition to such use of force, but there was no armed resistance, as there had been in Hungary, and force majeure triumphed once again. The Czechs were deeply embittered by the experience. They felt badly let down by the West, as they had done after the Munich Agreement. They also felt let down by the Hungarians and Poles, whom they had considered to be fellow sufferers under the Soviet yoke. But most of all they deeply resented the return of Germans in uniform after the bitter years of occupation between 1938 and 1945.

One curious feature of the invasion of Czechoslovakia was that, although it involved numerous non-Soviet formations and clearly used the Warsaw Pact co-ordinating machinery, it was actually commanded by the commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces and not by the commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact.

THE POLISH CRISIS: 1980–81

Poland has been fought over and partitioned on numerous occasions during the past two centuries, but in the aftermath of the Second World War it took on a new role as the supply route between the USSR and Soviet forces confronting NATO across the Inner German Border. Despite the presence of a Soviet garrison numbering some 40,000, it proved to be a troublesome ally, due in part to historical factors, the most recent being the Red Army drive on Warsaw in 1920, the partitioning of Polish territory with Nazi Germany in 1939, and the murder of some 15,000 of Poland’s political and military elite in the Katyn Forest in 1940.

The first major unrest came in June 1956. It started with factory workers in Poznań protesting about low pay and standards of living, but then, like the Berlin uprising in 1953, turned into a more general protest against the Communist government. A Soviet delegation, headed by Nikolai Bulganin, arrived in Warsaw in July, but the Polish leaders stood up to them and matters simmered until October, when disagreements within the upper echelons of the Polish Communist Party resulted in a visit by another Soviet delegation, this time headed by First Secretary Khrushchev, on 19 October. The Polish Communist leader, Gomułka, warned the Soviets of the dire consequences of military intervention, and, following Khrushchev’s return to Moscow, a meeting of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party resulted in the defeat of the anti-reform group, elected Gomułka as first secretary, and dropped Marshal Rokossovsky from the Politburo.[5] Faced with strong support for the new regime from the mass of the Polish people and in the absence of any suggestion that Poland should abandon the Warsaw Pact or evict the Soviet army garrison, Khrushchev telephoned Gomułka to inform him that the USSR had no further objections to his limited reforms.

There was more trouble in December 1970, when shipyard workers in Gdańsk rioted. This time it was Gomułka who was ousted, being replaced by Edward Gierek, who once again tried to resolve the workers’ grievances. There was further trouble in 1976, when food prices were increased, but after several riots the government backed down and the prices returned to their previous level, while Gierek negotiated a large Soviet loan to enable him to meet some of the workers’ demands.

In July 1980 the government once again raised meat prices and, as before, this quickly led to riots, which started on this occasion at a tractor factory in Warsaw. Unrest spread quickly, and in August 50,000 workers came out on strike, including those at the Gdańsk shipyard. By now the demands had increased to include political and trade union reform, and the agreement reached between the government and the Gdańsk shipworkers included the right to form non-Communist trade unions, resulting in the official establishment of the ‘Solidarity’ union. Gierek was replaced by Stanisław Kania as the crisis deepened, but the new man seemed equally unable to find a solution, and the civil disturbances increased.

Kania was visited by no less than three separate delegations of senior Soviet officials between January and March 1981, and the tempo of Warsaw Pact exercises increased, all of which bore a disturbing resemblance to events in Czechoslovakia in 1968. So, too, did the next development: a letter from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in mid-September, which drew Kania’s attention to the widespread Polish criticism of the USSR and its soldiers, and expressed an earnest hope that the Polish leadership would take resolute steps to stop this.

By October Soviet patience was beginning to run out, and on 28 October 1981 the minister of national defence, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, was appointed first secretary of the Polish United Workers Party – the only soldier ever to be appointed to such a post in any east-European Communist party. Jaruzelski first banned all strikes for a period of ninety days and then on 13 December imposed martial law under the control of a newly created ‘Military Council’. The crisis was now effectively over – at least for the time being.

Throughout these events the threat of a repeat of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia hung over the country, and Marshal V. G. Kulikov, the Pact’s commander-in-chief, was a frequent visitor to Poland. He called on First Secretary Kania in February 1981 and on the new first secretary, General Jaruzelski, once just before the ban on strikes was imposed in November and again on the day that the martial-law decree was issued in December.

As during the earlier Czechoslovak crisis, the number of Warsaw Pact exercises had increased, with no less than fourteen being held between September 1980 and December 1981, when the crisis ended. One of the largest was a major command and staff exercise lasting from 17 March to 7 April 1981; designated Soyuz-81, this involved Czechoslovak, East German and Polish troops, including a large number of reservists from all participating countries. A similar exercise, designated Zapad-81, followed in September.

There can be no doubt that planning for an invasion went much further than just staff preparations. Western intelligence detected major troop concentrations around the Polish borders in early December and expected the actual operation to begin on 8 December. One piece of evidence was the use of a huge building at Prora on the Baltic island of Rügen as a transit camp for several thousand East German troops assembling for the operation (although they returned to their peacetime locations once the operation had been cancelled).^{1} Erich Honecker, the East German leader, wrote to Soviet first secretary Brezhnev on 26 November, strongly urging him to press for Warsaw Pact intervention at the forthcoming Pact meeting on 5 December. Numerous Western leaders urged Brezhnev not to do so, however, and this, coupled with the firm measures being imposed by General Jaruzelski, appears to have had an effect, since when the leaders met in Moscow they decided not to invade.^{2}

The armies of the ‘southern tier’ of the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania) did not take part in any of these activities and were not included in the plans to invade Poland.

General Jaruzelski has consistently declined to give any details of events during this period, but there can be little doubt that Poland would have been invaded either by the Warsaw Pact or by Soviet forces alone had he not taken over and pacified his country. Poland was vital to Soviet strategic plans in a way that neither Czechoslovakia or Hungary had been, since all the supply routes to East Germany ran through the country.[6] Further, such an invasion would have been strenuously resisted not only by the Polish people, but also, in all probability, by large elements, if not the entirety, of the Polish army. Such resistance would have been even more violent had troops from the GDR joined their ‘class comrades’ of the Soviet army, and it is just possible that the West might have been dragged in, although it was physically separated from Poland by East Germany. The alternatives to Jaruzelski were therefore extremely dire, and it may well be that he actually saved his country from a bloody fate and was not the villain he has been made out to be.

THE FIRST MAVERICK – ALBANIA

Albania, with a population of some 3 million and the poorest country in Europe, was the smallest state to join the Warsaw Pact. Following a civil war in 1944 the Communists, headed by Enver Hoxha, seized power and established a ‘people’s republic’ in January 1946. The regime was initially friendly with Yugoslavia, but when Stalin and Tito split in 1948 Hoxha aligned with the Soviet Union, and in return he received considerable economic and military assistance. Albania was one of the founder members of the Warsaw Pact, although one of its few major contributions was to provide the Soviet navy with a base on the island of Sazan (Saseno) in the Gulf of Vlorës, in return for which the Soviet Union cancelled Albania’s considerable debt, made large credits available, and also supplied much military and naval equipment, including two submarines and a variety of surface vessels.

Hoxha was a strict Stalinist and reacted very strongly to Khrushchev’s denunciation of the former Soviet dictator in a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. As relations cooled, the Soviet and other east-European governments reduced Albania’s line of credit, making its finances still worse, and Hoxha developed relations with the only other ‘Stalinist’ power: Communist China. China’s relations with the Soviet Union also worsened, and the Soviet leaders started to condemn China’s new friend, Albania, as a means of disguising their real target: China itself. As a result, in December 1961 Albania severed all relations with the USSR and left the Warsaw Pact. The Albanians also seized all Soviet facilities in the country, including the naval base on Sazan, where their haul included two Soviet submarines which happened to be in port.

Thereafter, Albania remained a maverick. It maintained close relations with China for some years until the Chinese cut off their aid in 1978, after which Albania carried on alone. In effect, however, its only role of even marginal significance in the Cold War was its relatively brief membership of the Warsaw Pact and its provision of berthing facilities to the Soviet navy within the confines of the Mediterranean.

THE SECOND MAVERICK – ROMANIA

During the Second World War Romania provided two armies which fought alongside their German allies on the Eastern Front, losing some 173,000 troops in the battle of Stalingrad. By 1944 national support for the war had waned, and in early 1944 King Michael deposed the dictator General Ion Antonescu and surrendered unconditionally to the advancing Soviet armies. On 30 December 1947, however, the king was compelled to abdicate and Romania became a ‘people’s republic’, and in 1948 Georghe Georghiu-Dej, a long-time Communist, was appointed first secretary of the Communist Party at Moscow’s insistence.

Georghiu-Dej controlled Romania until 1965 and originally supported the Soviet line, especially over the Soviet army’s quelling of the Poznán riots and the Hungarian uprising. Such support played a key role in the Soviet decision to withdraw its troops from Romania in 1958, but it now appears that Georghiu-Dej was playing a double game. In 1963 the Romanian ambassador to the United Nations held a meeting with US secretary of state Dean Rusk in which the Romanian referred to the recent Cuban Missile Crisis and explained that his country had opposed the Soviet moves and would never support the USSR in wars outside the immediate area of the Warsaw Pact. In return for a promise of this, he asked for, and was later given, an assurance that the USA would not target missiles on Romania.^{3}

Nikolae Ceauşescu was carefully groomed to succeed Georghiu-Dej, and took over as first secretary (later changed to general secretary) in 1965. He adopted an increasingly nationalist position, and his relationship with the Warsaw Pact was ambivalent, to say the least.

Ceauşescu openly opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia and flatly refused to allow Romanian troops to take part; indeed, he even ordered a limited mobilization to protect his country’s northern border with the USSR. Following this, in 1972 at Ceauşescu’s behest the National Assembly passed a law which banned military operations outside Romania’s borders, leading to a national strategy in which regular troops would fight delaying actions in border regions, buying time for a levée en masse, following which the invader would be faced with a prospect of a people’s war.

On the other hand, the Romanian armed forces maintained a large contingent at the Warsaw Pact Joint Headquarters in Moscow, and a Soviet staff remained at the Romanian Defence Ministry throughout the Cold War. Romania also remained on the Warsaw Pact’s infrastructure committees and commissions. Other contradictions included Romania’s refusal to permit any Warsaw Pact troop deployments on its territory,[7] while allowing its air force to be integrated into the Warsaw Pact air defence system.

The Romanian armaments programme was another curious affair. Parts of the army were well equipped, particularly the mountain troops, while others, such as the armoured corps, had much outdated equipment. Considerable national resources were devoted to building a Romanian-designed destroyer[8] and frigates, although in any conflict against their only possible enemy, the infinitely more powerful Soviet Black Sea Fleet, their operational careers would have been very brief. Indeed, there were indications that the megalomania which seems to have afflicted Ceauşescu’s later career even prompted him to take an interest in the acquisition of nuclear weapons, although how far this developed has yet to be revealed.^{4}

FINIS

In the end, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was not due to external interference, because, whatever they may have been doing clandestinely, the Western powers and NATO demonstrated time and again that they were not prepared to intervene openly. Thus the East Berlin and Poznań rioters and the street fighters in Budapest and Prague were never going to receive physical support from NATO, and they knew it. Instead, the Pact imploded, partly due to Gorbachev’s reluctance to maintain its hegemony by force when he became general secretary of the CPSU, although its own internal contradictions also played a role. Deep down, however, only a handful of people in each member country were actually devoted Communists, and even fewer looked to the Soviet Union as their natural ally against the West. Allied to this was the implacable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, where being Christian really did matter and gave many of the anti-Communists the strength to hold on.

The major events affecting the end of the Cold War were:

• the dismantling of the Berlin Wall began (22 December 1989);

• the Romanian regime collapsed following Ceauşescu’s flight, capture, trial and death (25 December 1989);

• Soviet troops began to withdraw from Czechoslovakia (February 1990) and Hungary (March 1990); both withdrawals were completed by 19 June 1991;

• West and East Germany were reunified (3 October 1990); East German armed forces were disbanded;

• Lech Wałesa was elected president of Poland (9 December 1990);

• the Baltic states declared their independence (Lithuania on 11 March 1990; Estonia on 20 August 1991; Latvia on 21 August 1991);

• the western republics of the Soviet Union declared their independence (Belorussia (now Belarus) on 24 August 1991; Moldova (formerly Moldavia) on 27 August 1991; Ukraine on 5 December 1991).

In the middle of all these momentous events, the quiet, almost furtive, dismantling of the Warsaw Pact’s military and political apparatus on 31 March 1991 passed unmourned and almost unnoticed.