The Third World War: August 1985

CHAPTER 21: The Centre Holds

Early on 13 August it was confirmed to SACEUR that the transatlantic convoys proceeding from the United States were at last within the UK Air Defence Region, under air cover operating from bases in France and the United Kingdom. Losses to personnel brought across by air (which included most of the units in reinforcing formations, together with the greater part of their light and some heavy equipment), had been high. Losses at sea to the ships bringing the balance of the heavy equipment, with considerable numbers of men and invaluable munitions, had also been heavy. Nevertheless there was now an early prospect of augmentation of the forces available to Allied Command Europe by some four divisions, together with a corps headquarters and corps and army troops. The massive build-up which Soviet action had been planned to forestall was already under way.

With a heavy concentration of air defence and, of no less importance, elaborate precautions on the part of French police and troops to avoid civil disturbance and disruption (see Chapter 22), the ships of the CAVALRY convoy could be expected to begin discharging into French ports, where US troops were waiting to take over their equipment, early on the morning of the 14th. Fully equipped units would then move by road and rail at best speed through France and Belgium into the area round Aachen.

At noon on that day, 13 August 1985, the Supreme Commander ordered the release of four divisions from the theatre reserve. They were to come under command to NORTHAG from 0001 hours, 14 August, for the purpose of opening an offensive from present forward locations in the direction of Bremen. This was to start not later than at first light the following day, 15 August. The operation, codenamed ‘Culloden’, was already far advanced in contingency planning.

It was known for certain, from high-level surveillance, SIGINT and deep agency reports on troop movements, that the enemy divisions now in action were from 7 Guards Army, brought up (as was also the case with 5 Guards Army) out of the Byelorussian Military District in the USSR. Behind the leading motor-rifle divisions in the first echelon of the assault force were two tank divisions. In greater depth still, but with their leading units still only some thirty kilometres in rear, were three more divisions, believed to be from the Twenty-Eighth Army out of the same military district. It was now known that the unsuccessful airborne assault, by 103 Guards Airborne Division, had also been mounted from there.

Of the Red Army formations met in action up to a week ago there was now little sign in the forward areas, though some were known to be dispersed well in the rear. Of those which had taken part in the initial assault on 4 August, no unit at all, on the unquestionable evidence of reliable local sources, now remained on Federal German soil. The Soviet practice of using divisions for three to five days in all-out assault, to very near the point of total exhaustion, and then extracting them for replacement by completely new formations, was clearly to be seen in action. On the Allied side most formations had already been in action more than once.

At 0400 hours on 14 August Warsaw Pact forces, after very heavy air and artillery preparation, but no chemical attack, opened the expected assault on the Venlo position. Airborne attack in battalion strength on the flanks fifteen kilometres in rear, on Neuss and Roermond, proved fortunately to be of little more than nuisance value. Two German Home Defence Groups, one on each flank, each of nearly a brigade in strength, gave an excellent account of themselves in a role for which they had done much training: after some very tough opposition the German reservist and civilian soldiers triumphed over both attacks. Allied air defence entirely prevented any heliborne follow-up. The crossings over the Rivers Rhine and Maas remained in Allied hands, under the control of severely harassed engineers, open at least by night and even sporadically by day. The enemy’s attempt to isolate by airborne action the forward edge of the Allied battle area was thus a total failure.

In the attack on the Venlo position the forward concentration of Allied forces, four divisions deployed between two rivers on a front of thirty kilometres, with anti-tank defences that were strong and well disposed in depth, put any use of the enemy’s light lead forces on the usual pattern out of the question. The attack came surging in, at first shooting light, after thirty minutes’ intense artillery fire aimed at suppressing anti-tank defences, with three motor-rifle divisions up, each led by its tank regiment, the tank companies coming in first and the motor-rifle companies following, mounted in their BMP, some 200 metres behind. Direct ATGW hits on leading BMP soon indicated that a mounted attack could only bog down. A dismounted infantry attack in great strength followed, under fire support from tanks, SP guns and BMP, with heavy concentrations from the tube artillery and rocket launchers of the enemy’s divisional artillery, and air-to-ground attack pressed hard in spite of considerable losses in aircraft. The very heavy weight of the assault, with unit after unit piled on regardless of casualties, began to tell before long. Here and there NATO defences, swamped by numbers, began to crumble. The enemy, within an hour or two, was seen to be gaining a clear advantage.

At the same time as the main assault on the Venlo position, another attack was being made by one Soviet motorized division west of the Maas, southwards towards Roermond. Heavy Allied missile concentrations on crossings over the Maas and Lower Rhine, which were being kept open with great difficulty by Soviet engineers, took sufficient of the edge off this attack to enable one US brigade, operating with two Dutch regiments under command and anti-tank defences disposed in depth, which the enemy had found it impossible entirely to suppress, just to hold its own. Ground was given, but sufficient of the network of ATGW remained in action to foil the enemy’s first attempt at doing to the Venlo position on the west bank of the Maas, on a smaller scale, what the general Soviet offensive had been trying to do to AFCENT as a whole, that is, to roll it up from the rear by attack from north to south along the west bank of the Rhine.

An even stronger enemy attack than that west of the Maas developed at the same time east of the Rhine, where units of II British Corps, with a Dutch brigade and a strong and very recently regrouped German division, together with three German Home Defence Groups, the whole force under a German general-lieutenant, had up to now succeeded in preventing the movement of any but light forces across the hardly formidable water obstacle of the River Lippe. Three things had here contributed to an extremely important delay in the enemy’s advance: flooding, which had done something to canalize movement from the north-east; the extensive use of mines; and close air support, exploiting the slight but growing advantage in the air the Allies now enjoyed and the evident superiority in electronic warfare which was contributing so largely to it.

Of great assistance in the battle of the Lippe, on the right flank of the critical fight for Venlo, were the heightened protection from air attack electronic techniques afforded the Allied ground forces and, above all, the survival of effective anti-tank defences against all attempts completely to suppress them. What was of scarcely less importance here was the action on the ground of Federal German reserve and territorial forces.

Even though a numerical superiority, at the chosen point of attack, of twenty or thirty to one in favour of the enemy could be greatly reduced, considerable advantage still remained to them. By nightfall on 14 August the forward edge of the Allied position east of the Rhine was back to a line from Paderborn to Duisburg. But for the tough fighting of the German territorial units, now reinforced by another complete group, even this could not have been held. What became known as the Battle of the Lippe was indeed something of a triumph for the reserve forces of the Federal Republic.

By nightfall the centre of the Venlo front, between the Rivers Rhine and Maas, had broken. The two British divisions defending the position, with one German and one Belgian division, had been driven apart, and penetrations of up to twenty kilometres had been reported.

Pressure from the enemy to exploit his advantage continued during the hours of darkness. A full-scale assault was resumed at first light. Repeated requests from II British Corps for nuclear fire support continued to be refused by AFCENT on the Supreme Allied Commander’s orders, but very heavy artillery concentrations, from both tube and missile systems, together with tactical air support on a scale not yet seen on the Allied side, was having a marked effect in slowing down the enemy’s advance. It had been possible during the night, moreover, to stabilize in depth a number of defensive localities, where the anti-tank network was found to have remained, to a surprising and encouraging extent, still in being. The enemy’s suppressive action had been very far from fully effective. His advancing armour and mechanized infantry now found itself obliged to move through a system of interlocking ATGW positions which was still formidable.

What has been said before deserves to be said again. More and more, as the fighting in the Central Region had developed during the last few days, was the superiority of Allied electronic technology being seen on every side, both on the ground and in the air. Now is not the time to speak at length on the improvement in electronic techniques, in which the West had so very far outstripped the East over the last few years, techniques in which a dramatic reduction in the size and complexity of electronic components, as well as in their failure rate, had been accompanied by a phenomenal reduction in cost. It is sufficient to say that, almost unnoticed, the West, unhampered by industrial collectivism under state control and with the stimulus of commercial competition, had established a lead over the East. This had long been uneasily observed there but was now seen to be far greater even than had been suspected. Its results were manifest in every sphere: in the exploitation of the attack and reconnaissance capabilities of F-15 aircraft and remotely-piloted vehicles (RPV), for example; in the deadly impact of precision-guided missiles (PGM), which were immune to interference; in the netting of tactical electronic units; in the reduction of vulnerability to interference with communications by proliferation of channels; and in countless other ways. Allied electronic counter-measures and counter-counter-measures were at the same time reducing the effectiveness of hostile air and missile attacks without prejudice to their own.

The operation of carefully co-ordinated intercept and interference systems against communications was proving invaluable in the ground battle above all. The location of hostile launchers and their swift destruction by terminally-homing PGM; the jamming of hostile sensors; the diversion of missile attacks; the application of a wide range of electronic counter-measures, behind an elaborate and effective barrier of counter-counter-measures, to reduce the enemy’s capacity to retaliate; and not least a policy of concentrated attack on the enemy’s command and control mechanisms — all this was paying off handsomely. The Soviet system of operational command was particularly sensitive. It was too inelastic to withstand continued and determined efforts to seek out and destroy headquarters installations. The inability of regimental commands to handle a fluid situation when deprived of signals communication with divisional headquarters was now more marked than ever. Forward radio intercept of transmission from penetrating Soviet columns was picking up with growing frequency requests for fresh orders in an unexpected situation.

Anti-tank defences, well disposed in depth, and in a highly favourable electronic environment, could do a great deal to offset a heavy numerical inferiority on the ground, particularly when the Allied tactical air forces were proving more effective than those of their opponents. It could hardly be a complete substitute for adequate strength in guns and armour on the battlefield, however. The commander of II British Corps had not lost all tactical control within his area of responsibility. His corps was still an operational entity, but it was split and penetrated, and between groups now no longer able to support each other the enemy’s advance went on. Though anti-tank defence detachments took a very heavy toll, missile re-supply to the launchers was proving more and more difficult. One by one ATGW crews were pinned down and overrun by motorized infantry in BMP, now for the most part, in a development of high significance, attacking mounted. By the late afternoon of 14 August leading elements of a Soviet tank division were approaching Julich.

During the preceding night, however, a French armoured division had been moving into the area around Maastricht. This was part of a French corps previously intended for the Southern Army Group, but switched by SACEUR to this location at the urgent instance of AFCENT (after hasty discussion with the French government and swift intervention from Washington) late on the 13th. By first light on the 15th, though not yet in contact, this French division was in a useful and well-balanced position. Still rather thin on the ground as its units moved up, it was nevertheless in touch on its right with the left flank of a force of two US brigades, with which German Territorial units were operating in support, deployed and largely dug-in east and west of Duren.

The peacetime location of HQ AFCENT at Brunssum, not far away, had now been finally abandoned, command having been long exercised from a field headquarters whose present location was near Liege. It was into the area of Aachen that the advanced parties of the newly arrived US Corps, the disembarkation of their heavy equipment in French ports now virtually complete, began to arrive just before dawn on the 15th.

To the east of what was now becoming known as the Krefeld Salient two British divisions and one German were fighting with their backs to the Rhine. Their fire on the enemy’s flank, exploited by the timely manoeuvre of armoured squadron groups, could not stop his southward advance but did much to slow it down. On the other side of the Rhine, on the east bank, 14 August was a critical day. NORTHAG was at all costs determined to hold firm in the area south of the Lippe, to get the offensive now in preparation for the following morning off to a fair start. Against the weight of opposition pressing down from the north this was far from easy, but the battle that was now being fought, in great part by German troops both of the regular army and of the reserve, on German soil, was everywhere recognized to be of critical importance to the whole future of a free Germany. The Battle of the Lippe was above all a stand by Germans, to give the best chance of success in the counter-offensive for which Allied formations of six nations were now advancing to their assembly and dispersal areas in preparation for the attack. At nightfall the lines of approach for Allied units were still clear. They were kept clear till dawn.

During the night the boundary between the Northern and Central Army Groups was moved northwards. It now ran from Koblenz to Hannover.

We have treated the operations during these few days in mid-August 1985 with a degree of detail which might seem out of place in a book so limited in scope. The reason is quite simple: 15 August was a critical day, a major turning point in the whole battle for Europe.

What would have happened if the Alliance had done as little for its defences in the past quinquennium as in the wasted years before is, as we look back today, painfully evident. The Russians would by this time have been secure on their stop-line on the Rhine, the Western Alliance would have lain in ruins, and the brutal obliteration of the Federal Republic of Germany would already have begun. The hopes of freedom in the subject peoples of the Soviet Union, both within the USSR and outside it, beginning once more to stir when war broke out, would have withered and died under a suffocating blanket of despair.

What had been done within the Atlantic Alliance was not enough to prevent war. Brought to the edge of it by miscalculation and mischance, with time not on their side, the Russians were not held back from the invasion of Europe by the clear certainty that an invasion would fail. On the contrary, the opening, even if less attractive than before, still looked too good to miss, especially as it might not come again. What the Western Allies had just managed to do, through a new surge of confidence and resolve in some of them at least, was enough to soften the blow when it came, to prevent the swift military resolution on which Soviet Russia depended, to give time and opportunity for the use of some at least of the huge resources disposed of in the West, and eventually to spark off the explosions in subject nations which were in the end to bring the Soviet Union down.

At midday on 15 August, as the units of the new US corps, fully equipped and ready for action, were hurrying under formidable defensive air cover by road and rail through France, while on the far side of the Atlantic further shipping was being marshalled into convoys to bring across the equipment for another, the welcome news reached AFCENT that the NORTHAG offensive had got off well and was making progress.

For the first time Allied ground forces were operating under conditions of local air superiority. A formidable slice of 4 ATAF’s air reserves had been allotted by COMAAFCE to 2 ATAF. CENTAG and SOUTHAG were supported only by what was left of 4 ATAF, with the remnants of 5 ATAF and the French Tactical Air Force, the latter long released from the French government’s insistence that it operate only in support of troops under French command. For the time being, while the main counter-offensive battle was opened in the north, this was enough in the south. SOUTHAG’s turn would come.

Bremen airfield had been seized by US airborne troops and some, if not many, air-portable units had been flown in, under anti-air defences that were now proving more and more effective. The main attack, with three divisions up and two more to follow, moving across the Lippe just before first light, with elaborate deception measures to indicate an attack further west, was very greatly helped by the emergence of well-equipped and carefully hidden stay-behind groups of German Jagd Kommandos and British SAS (Special Air Service) left in the Teutoburger Wald ten days before. A brilliantly successful SAS attack on a Soviet divisional HQ did so much to confuse the Warsaw Pact defence that by nightfall on 15 August forward troops of a German division were once more back in Osnabriick.

Useful and heartening though the Allied riposte might be, it could by no stretch of the imagination be seen as the victory over the invading forces of the Warsaw Pact which was immediately announced, to the great discomfort of Allied chiefs of staff, by the Western press and TV networks worldwide, above all in the United States. Little else had changed. In Norway, for example, AFNORTH, without much in the way of air support except what could be provided from the United Kingdom, and, with great difficulty, from carriers operating north of the Faroes, was still containing and harassing the Soviet advance in the exceedingly difficult terrain of Troms and Nordland. From the Skagerrak to the Hook of Holland the coast, and the hinterland to some depth, was in occupation by Pact forces under Polish command. Denmark had been overrun more than a week ago. Hamburg had been declared an open city, a declaration which the Russians had ignored. It was being left alone all the same, bypassed for attention later. The Berlin garrison, surrounded by troops from divisions now withdrawn out of the fighting in the FRG, was being almost contemptuously left alone. From the Baltic and Carpathian Military Districts of the USSR some twenty divisions were on the move to come in, as the next echelon, behind those that had followed up, out of Byelorussia, the first incursion from the GSFG.

Further south little Austria had been brutally brushed aside. Two or three brigades of good mountain troops were fighting on with the French and Germans in Bavaria, and older folk in Graz were remembering again how things had been in an occupation by Russian soldiers once before. AFSOUTH, with its regional headquarters no longer in Italy but in Spain, had fallen apart. Soviet domination of the Italian peninsula, if unobtrusive, was complete. In Yugoslavia the civil war dragged on, with US marines, once in the eye of the storm before it became a hurricane, now virtually cut off in Slovenia and tenuously supplied by air. Greece was manning her frontier with Bulgaria, alongside Turkey-in-Europe. Asiatic Turkey was under some Soviet pressure from the north, though not yet an object of major attack. The Soviet Black Sea fleet had moved through the Straits already. That, for the USSR, was enough for the present in south-east Europe.

The whole Allied position could hardly be called a winning one.

In the Central Region itself there were now deployed some forty divisions of the Warsaw Pact, fifteen of them tank divisions. Though some, at least, of this formidable order of battle had felt the effect of Allied air and missile attack, not more than half of it had yet been in action against an enemy on the ground. By any standard it was still three to four times as effective in firepower as the aggregate of Allied troops arrayed against it, and up to now the Warsaw Pact had held the whole initiative.

The Allied offensive of 15 August, nonetheless, was the key to changes of critical importance. In the first place it brought into being in the forward areas a new operational situation. The enemy had now to set about securing his flanks and rear before attempting to resume the full impetus of his forward movement, which it was only prudent for the time being to reduce. But there was more to it than this. The operational challenge to the Soviet High Command could, at least in the shorter term, be met and mastered. The political consequences of what was happening, in the chemistry of which the military action of 15 August can now be seen as a catalyst, could not.

The Soviet plan to bring about the military collapse of NATO’s Central Region, with the occupation of the Federal Republic and the disintegration of the Atlantic Alliance, before there was time to mobilize the West’s superior resources, or for the Western Allies to come to an agreement on the use of nuclear weapons, had already gone quite badly wrong. The intervention of the French, and the vigour with which it was pursued, had been as unwelcome as it had been unexpected. The improvements to NATO’s defensive posture in the previous few years, though not such as to put invasion by the Warsaw Pact right out of the question, had been sufficient to make it a good deal harder to bring off. The magnitude of the superiority in electronic technology enjoyed by the Allies, above all by the United States, and the adroitness of its application on the battlefield, had also come as an ugly shock. This, among other consequences, had prevented the suppression of anti-aircraft and anti-tank defences upon whose elimination Soviet tactical practice, both in the air and on the ground, so heavily relied. It had greatly hampered, by the severe degrading of communications which were sometimes reduced almost to nil, the operation of mobile formations expected to manoeuvre in depth.

The combined arms operations, moreover, upon which the battle-fighting method of the Red Army fundamentally depended, had been anything but a complete success. The Allies had operated, as it were, in the interstices of the method, separating components whose strength lay in their interdependence. The four main elements of the combined arms concept — manoeuvre, fire suppression, organic defence and combat support — had rarely been allowed to operate together in anything like the degree of harmony required.

For all these and other reasons the strategic programme had fallen so far behind that there was now a real danger of that massive Western build-up which it had been so important to forestall. Unaccountably, troop reinforcement over the US air bridge had continued and the Soviet Navy had been unable to prevent the safe arrival of heavy equipment by sea. More reinforcements were on the way. From the military point of view the question had to be asked: how much was there now to be gained by going on with a plan which had already failed?

The political consequences of incomplete military success in Germany were to be far-reaching. The military might of the Warsaw Pact had not been defeated. Far from it. What had happened, however, was almost as important as defeat. The Red Army had been shown not to be invincible. As awareness of its limitations began to spread so hope began to rise in places where, up to now, only an occasional display of brave and fruitless dissidence had relieved the grey uniformity of a hopeless resignation.

National revolt was still a long way off but the seeds of it were already being sown as, in spite of the strictest censorship, the news went swiftly round that all was not well with the offensive of the Warsaw Pact in Germany. From mid-August onwards growing partisan activity, with widespread sabotage and the disruption of rail communications through satellite countries, began to present an increasing problem on the lines of communication. This occurred first where, from the point of view of military supply, it mattered most — Poland. The same thing also began to happen in Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser extent in Hungary and Romania.

Allied assistance to partisan forces, already some months in preparation, was immediately forthcoming. In the last year techniques of the Second World War, which some had feared might be allowed to lapse entirely, had been revived. The very large expatriate communities, particularly of Poles and Czechs, and to a lesser extent of Hungarians, in the United States, and of Poles born in Britain to ex-soldiers of the Second World War who had settled there, had been combed for recruits. Detachments of some size were already in an advanced state of training and were now, with munitions, weapons, communications equipment and supplies, being lifted surreptitiously by air into their own countries. Their principal task, in addition to the raising of now no longer wholly unjustified hopes of future deliverance, was interference, to the maximum degree, with rail and road communications.

As the US air bridge had so dramatically shown, the personnel of military formations could readily be replaced by air. The Soviet airline Aeroflot had for years been organized for, and practised in, the task of personnel reinforcement, and in the ‘exercises’ which had preceded invasion had been fully mobilized for it. Some freight movement, too, even of heavy loads, was possible by air, but very large tonnages of fuel and munitions could not be handled so easily, still less the large numbers of heavy equipment, the tanks, SP guns and BMP, which were needed as unit replacements, and least of all the entire provision for an armoured or motorized formation moving up to relieve another which was exhausted and depleted in the battle. Road movement could help, though with all the disadvantages of wear and tear upon equipment the essential means of transport for combat formations remained the railway.

Great improvements had been made in the last few years in the rail support system within the Warsaw Pact. Gauges had been unified, equipment standardized, tracks multiplied. Long stretches of permanent way nevertheless remained open to interference, only secure under close and continuous watch, a heavy drain on military manpower. Partisan attack, over the very long stretches involved, was becoming a great and growing problem, absorbing in protective duties increasing numbers of formations which should have been moving up to the front.

The Soviet Union had always enjoyed the advantages of relatively short land lines of communication between the area of probable operations in Europe and the home base. The United States had the Atlantic Ocean to cross, involving much longer distances and less secure transit in slower and less efficient load carriers. Air transportation had modified the position and reduced the disadvantage to the US. It could not entirely remove it. This was a situation that the Soviet Union had always sought to exploit (with a success that throws an interesting light on the gullibility of some Western politicians) in any discussion on mutual force reductions. The advantage of land over sea routes would always persist, but the action of determined partisans, maintained in the face of measures of repression and reprisal whose very brutality underlined the importance of what was happening, was already doing much to reduce it.

In absolute terms, moreover, the mass and volume (to say nothing of the cost) of all that was required, particularly in fuel and munitions, to maintain an army in field operations at an intensive rate against a similarly equipped opponent, was now very great. It had taken a quantitative jump since the Second World War. Warfare in the Middle East in the seventies had shown this very clearly, if on a relatively small scale. It was just no longer possible, at the rate at which stocks could now be exhausted, to sustain intensive operations of war for months on end. Head — and equipment — counts were no longer the true measure of an army’s capability. Formations in large numbers could be a liability rather than an advantage unless they could be kept effectively in action.

The Soviet war-fighting philosophy, from whatever origins it may have been evolved, was in the circumstances of the 1980s exactly right. It enjoined the initiation of total and violent offensive action, swiftly followed through to the early attainment of a valuable objective. The position of military advantage thus secured would then be exploited by political means. Speed was everything. The corollary was that failure to secure the objective in good time must result in a thorough-going reappraisal, in which to continue to press towards the same end might very well be the least sensible course.

In the operation in the Central Region, at its sharpest point in the Krefeld Salient, the Warsaw Pact advance never got any further than Julich. The newly arrived US corps, equipped out of Convoy CAVALRY, was already by 16 August building up on the western flank. This posed a threat which, taken in conjunction with the northward offensive of the Northern Army Group, could mean nothing other than a halt to the advance and an enforced change-over to defensive action (for which the Red Army was not well suited) or to withdrawal.

The French division deployed in the Maastricht area in the emergency situation of 13–14 August was relieved as soon as US troops began to arrive in strength. It joined up with the rest of the Southern Army Group, which was now in a position, with some further switch-back of Allied air power, to open a counter-offensive towards the Czechoslovak frontier. This began on 17 August. By then NORTHAG’s northwards offensive towards Bremen had regained possession of the Teutoburger Wald, but it could make no further headway against the very heavy flank defences of a rearward regrouping movement by Pact forces which could hardly yet be described as a retreat.

We have looked in some detail at the circumstances leading to the abandonment of the initial plan of the Warsaw Pact and the rearward regrouping which followed. The events of the next few weeks can be passed over more rapidly. Before we move on, however, some comment on SACEUR’s handling of the battle may not be out of place.

It was a very near thing. The Supreme Commander was quite determined to avoid the use of battlefield nuclear weapons if he possibly could, in the certain conviction, shared by the President of the USA, that this could have no other result than swift escalation into the nightmare of unrestricted strategic nuclear exchange, with results which could not fail to be disastrous. As commander in the theatre he was also determined to keep under his own hand as long as he possibly could those modest theatre reserves which constituted his whole remaining capability to influence the battle. He was on the horns of a dilemma, precisely the same dilemma which had brought so much discomfort into the debate on the ‘forward defence’ of the FRG. To be able to hold off a very much superior attacking force, without giving ground, either additional troops were needed on the spot — or nuclear weapons.

SACEUR’s subordinate commanders had been pressing him to furnish one or the other with ever-growing urgency. Counter-offensive action to relieve pressure at the vital point was most critically necessary. It was the prospect of the arrival of the transatlantic reinforcement convoy which justified him, in his own judgment, in taking the considered (and considerable) risk of releasing his only reserves for this purpose before the new formations to reconstitute them were securely under his hand. This, it may be added, greatly strengthened him in resisting any further pressure for nuclear release.

Analysts are already busy in debate on the wisdom of Soviet naval policy in the seventies. We make some comment on this in Appendix 2. What is abundantly clear in the present connection is that without the US Navy, assisted by the European Allies, there would have been no further reinforcement of Allied Command Europe by any but light formations after the outbreak of hostilities. Without Allied air power the movement of troops to the theatre and the safe delivery of essential equipment would have been impossible. Without the expectation of early reinforcement SACEUR would have been faced with a choice between surrender of his last remaining means of influencing the battle or, by securing the release of battlefield nuclear weapons, committing the world to the near certainty of a catastrophic future. Without stout fighting by the German Territorial forces, in addition to the outstanding performance of the regular forces of the FRG, the Allied counter-offensive might never have got across the start-line. Without the strength and flexibility of Allied tactical air power, and its skilful exploitation, the battle for the Central Region would have been lost almost before it began. The list of what could have gone badly wrong is a long one. It was certainly a very near thing.

The rearward movement of Warsaw Pact forces in the Federal Republic was not the retreat of a defeated army. Though always under pressure from Allied forces which were growing constantly in strength, penetrating where they could and never failing to preserve that intimacy of contact which was always something of an insurance against nuclear attack, the forces of the Warsaw Pact were still able to develop a local superiority almost at will and to retain a high degree of tactical control along the forward edge of their battle area. They had failed in what they had set out to do, however, and the opportunity to do it could not be recreated. There was not only no point in staying where they were. It was going to become increasingly dangerous and difficult to try to do so. The wisest course was to withdraw.

We are concerned here only with the military situation as it confronted Allied Command Europe. Political developments, and particularly those within the Warsaw Pact, which were to become of paramount importance at a later stage, are another matter and are treated in Chapter 26.

In the AFNORTH area, the whole of Denmark and north Norway remained occupied. A gentle movement of the Soviet administrative elements, with security troops and guard units, which was virtually all that had moved into Italy in the first few days of August, had begun out of the AFSOUTH area. By the end of the month the communist-dominated Italian government was on its own, to make what reconciliation would be found possible with its former allies under the Atlantic Treaty.

In the Central Region the early withdrawal of the Soviet divisions in the Krefeld Salient, following hard upon the opening of the NORTHAG counter-offensive of 15 August, was the beginning of an orderly rearward movement along the whole Warsaw Pact front, everywhere — except possibly in the extreme south — under firm Soviet tactical control. A concentration of four Soviet divisions north of Osnabruck, facing south, kept open the southern hinge of a door which might otherwise have closed upon Pact formations moving eastwards out of the Low Countries and the westernmost parts of the Federal Republic, harassed on their way by Allied air attack and the action of II British Corps but still in being. The Allied airhead round Bremen, which might have been the hinge of the northern half of NORTHAG’s door, was firmly contained by the enemy; it would be some time before mine clearance allowed access to it from the sea. In spite of persistent pressure from the south the gap between the Teutoburger Wald and the North Sea coast was never fully closed, and Pact formations were able to move through it eastwards, if only, for the most part, at night. Allied artillery fire caused heavy losses and, in spite of the occasional temporary establishment of local air superiority by Pact air forces, Allied air attack was frequently of devastating effectiveness. A dogged Soviet screen of tank and motorized divisions, however, was able to maintain a defensive front, and this, with the help of local counter-attacks, just held off the threat from the south to the rearward movement.

The Allied purpose was less to inflict a punishing defeat on the armies of the Warsaw Pact in the field than to get them off the territory of the Federal Republic as soon as possible, with the minimum of Allied loss and collateral damage. From the junction with NORTHAG, which was now on a line running north-east through Hildesheim, CENTAG maintained continuous heavy pressure on Pact formations moving eastwards (though with no further major set-piece battle) all the way south to the junction with SOUTHAG. By 18 August no troops of the Warsaw Pact were anywhere to be found in the CENTAG area, out of captivity, west of the Demarcation Line. It was clear, however, that an advance by Allied troops across the line into the GDR would be fiercely resisted, and orders to Allied Command Europe were for the present to hold hard.

In north Germany the position was rather more complicated. Bremen was relieved by 20 August. On the 23rd the forces of the Pact had consolidated everywhere along the Demarcation Line except in the vicinity of Hamburg. Here the River Elbe was the front. Hamburg, its declaration by the Senat as an open city notwithstanding, had been occupied by the Russians. In order to avoid further harm to a city so far very little damaged and the loss of civilian life, no attempt was as yet being made by the Allies to take it back.

It was only in the extreme south that offensive operations were still in active progress. The Southern Army Group, with II French Corps, II German Corps and about a division of Austrian troops, all under French command, and a heavy concentration of Allied tactical air forces in support, had crossed a start-line between Nurnberg and Munchen on 17 August in an advance directed on Pilsen. It had moved into Czechoslovakia on the 20th and was now making slow but steady progress. Of the troops opposing it none were Czechoslovak. Instead, SOUTHAG was now facing Soviet divisions out of 8 Guards Army and the Thirty-eighth Army from the Carpathian Military District.

On 21 August the southern advance was brought to a halt, at least for the time being, with its left flank, where II German Corps was deployed, south-west of Cheb. It has since become clear that the Central Group of Soviet Forces was concerned at the possibility of invasion of the GDR from the south and was under orders to resist it strongly if it came. It can also be safely claimed that the forward thrust of the Southern Army Group threw the operations of the Warsaw Pact in the Central Region of NATO considerably off-balance and thus helped to expedite its withdrawal in the northern plain.

Three momentous weeks had passed since that morning of 4 August when the world woke up to find itself once more with a major war on its hands. Only a pocket, if an important one, of Federal territory was still in the enemy’s hands. Though still very much at war the Federal Republic was able to look cautiously around and make a first assessment of the damage. Bremen was in ruins. Hannover was very badly damaged too, particularly on the east and south. Probably on account of the speed of the action the damage in other cities was not as great. Kassel, Nurnberg and Munchen had all suffered, and the great cities of the Rhineland had not been spared, though the spire of Koln cathedral had again surprisingly survived. But though the future was obscure and peace was not yet in sight, the worst seemed to have been averted, for the time being at least. The invasion of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Warsaw Pact had failed and the Atlantic Alliance had survived.