The Cold War: A MILITARY History (2 page)

The Cold War does not have two convenient dates to mark its start and finish. No troops poured across a border to open the campaign, nor did
victorious
armies march in triumph through the enemy’s capital city to mark the end.

Many dates could be taken to mark the start of the Cold War, but the events of 1945 to 1949 are considered to be preliminary skirmishes and manoeuvring for position, and 4 April 1949, the date of signing the North Atlantic Treaty, which formalized the anti-Soviet alliance, is taken to be the most apt date.

Similarly, the end of the Cold War was publicly announced on at least ten occasions as triumphant politicians signed yet another agreement in Washington, London, Paris, Geneva or Moscow to reduce or remove tension. But the signal for the real end of the Cold War came in Berlin, the city which for forty-two years had crystallized all the issues at stake. There on one night in November 1989 an East German government official telephoned the security guard commander at the checkpoints on the Berlin Wall and ordered him to prevent East Berliners from crossing to the West. But the officer, probably no more senior than a captain, looked out the window, saw the vast crowd, sensed its determination, knew deep inside himself that the game was up, and, realizing the futility of it all, refused. Throughout the Cold War the Communist system had depended absolutely upon orders being obeyed, and with that refusal in East Berlin the entire system proceeded, with dreadful inevitability, to collapse.

The First and Second World Wars have both been recorded in great detail in a variety of government-sponsored ‘Official Histories’ by most of the countries involved. These histories set out the strategies and tactics of the military campaigns and record the industrial and civilian efforts to support the armed forces. Each runs into many volumes by a variety of authors, all working to an overall plan and coordinated by a managing editor. The resulting series have therefore become the standard works of reference on their subject, enabling future generations to study what went on, who was involved, and, in most cases, why the leaders acted as they did.

No such work has yet even been discussed for the Cold War, but this book is an attempt to paint an overall picture of some of the military factors involved. Perhaps it may spark interest in a proper ‘Official History’.

For this author there were no heroes and no villains in the Cold War. There were definitely two ‘sides’, and on a political level each felt the other to be wrong, but at the military level there were just millions of officers and sailors, soldiers and airmen, the great majority of whom were doing their job as best they knew how and carrying out the orders given to them by their governments.

There were hundreds of ‘incidents’. Aircraft were shot down, ships collided, and, on several occasions, tanks loaded with live ammunition faced each other across borders. But opponents ‘on the other side of the fence’
were
never left with no way out other than humiliation; no side ever pushed the other over the brink.

In attempting an unofficial history of even just the military factors in such a complex situation stretching over forty years, not every aspect can be covered, nor can all aspects be covered in the same detail. The book ends in 1989, as did the Cold War. In addition, because the Cold War was both very long and covered a vast area, the book concentrates on events in central Europe. This is not because the author considers events on the northern and southern flanks to have been unimportant, but is necessitated by the space available. Also, central Europe best symbolizes what went on during the Cold War and is the most likely place for fighting to have started, and also, possibly, for the issue to have been decided.

Frequent mention is made of military plans prepared during the Cold War, and a word of explanation is required. Many civilians find it hard to understand why soldiers, sailors and airmen spend so much of their time analysing possible threats against them and, when preparing plans, taking the worst case. Thus, throughout the Cold War, congressional and parliamentary committees and media correspondents were regularly given the direst of predictions about the other side’s numbers and capabilities. Sometimes there were genuine errors, but frequently each element in an estimate was given a pessimistic ‘tweak’ which, when all were put together, resulted in an overall prediction that was later proved to have been very wide of the mark indeed.

This predilection for the ‘worst case’ was partly due to professional caution and the desire not to be caught out. Far better, planners thought, to find the situation was not so bad after all. Partly, however, it was also due to the knowledge that if war did come it would almost certainly be of short duration and there would therefore be little chance to make good any peacetime deficiencies. Thus, by painting the gloomiest possible picture of the enemy’s strengths, one’s own side would be better armed to meet him should the day come. Matters were not helped, however, when politicians took the budget figure the military asked for and subtracted 10 per cent, since the military responded by adding an extra 10 per cent the next time around, on the assumption that they would lose it.

AUTHOR’S CONVENTIONS

A number of conventions have been used in this book.

National Designations

Wherever more than one nation is mentioned in a list, they are recorded in alphabetical order according to the initial letter of their name in the English
language
. Such a listing does not therefore imply any order of precedence, importance, preference or merit.

Soviet Military Equipment

There is scope for confusion concerning the designation of Soviet military equipment, since the same item (e.g. an aircraft, missile, tank, etc.) could have a US designation, a NATO reporting name, a Soviet military designation and a Soviet type name – although in most cases the last two were discovered only after the Cold War had ended. In order to simplify matters for the reader, the US/NATO system is used throughout, except in the case of aircraft, where the Soviet design bureau and number are used (e.g. MiG-21, Su-27, etc.).

Military Units

In military units, confusion can be caused by differing use of formation and unit designations. A US division was some 30 per cent larger than a Soviet division; in some armies a regiment was composed of three battalions, while in others a regiment was a battalion-sized unit. The reader is referred to the Glossary, under ‘Army formations and units’, for more information.

Naval, Air-Force and Army Titles

A particular difficulty arises with the titles of navies and air forces, especially where the word ‘royal’ appears in the title. The British, for example, use the title ‘Royal Navy’ to apply solely to their own navy, and with foreign navies which include the word ‘royal’ in their titles they insert the nation’s name, as in ‘Royal Dutch Navy’ and ‘Royal Malaysian Navy’. Within those countries, however, there is no such national qualifier: to a Malaysian the ‘Royal Navy’ (
Tentera Laut di-Raja
) is the Malaysian navy. Further, to use national titles in the vernacular may be difficult for readers of other nationalities to understand, while to translate them literally into English may cause further confusion. The German
Luftwaffe
, for example, translates as ‘Air Weapon’, while the French
Marine Nationale
translates as ‘National Navy’. To avoid all these problems, the convention has been adopted of referring to all navies, air forces and, for consistency, national armies simply by the national name followed by the words ‘navy’, ‘air force’ or ‘army’ in lower case – e.g. British air force, German navy, US air force, Soviet army and so on. Since all are treated identically, it is hoped that this will not cause offence.

Glossary

Any abbreviation is explained when it is first used in the main text. There is also a glossary at the end of the book, which explains the principal relevant military terms and abbreviations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank Wing Commander (Retired) Bruce Allcorn who proofread
Chapter 7
and made many valuable suggestions. He would also like to thank Major-General Sir Robert Corbett, the last British commandant in Berlin and author of
Berlin and The British Ally: 1945–1990
, for his helpful advice on life and events in that city.

He is also most grateful to Grant McIntyre, Gail Pirkis and Caroline Westmore of the publisher, John Murray, for turning what might have been a daunting and frustrating experience into a real pleasure. Finally, he wishes to express his particular gratitude to Bob Davenport, editor extraordinary, whose eagle eye, attention to the most minute detail, wide knowledge of English language, grammar and punctuation, and apparently infinite patience have made this book a much better document than it otherwise would have been.

If, however, despite all this help there are still errors in this book, they are the responsibility of the author alone.

PART I

THE TWO GREAT ALLIANCES

1

‘A Bewildered, Baffled and Breathless World’
¹

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.