The Third World War (16 page)

At the end of July the personnel of an armoured division, the first of the divisions earmarked for
USAREUR
, had been flown in from the United States. By nightfall on 2 August it had almost completed the drawing of its prepositioned combat equipment, including more than 300 XM-1 tanks. Some of its units, at least, had fired-in their guns at Grafenwdhr before dispersal in the area north-west of Wiirzburg, under command to V US Corps.

It was V US Corps’ sector, running north and south through Fuida, which was considered critical in
CEN-TAG
. The Demarcation Line with the East bulges out here in a bold westward curve towards the bend in the Rhine near Frankfurt-am-Main, at its closest no further from Frankfurt than 100 kilometres, with only another forty kilometres to the Rhine. Furthermore, in the hill country of the Thuringer Wald there is an important gap around Fulda itself, with the terrain becoming ever more readily negotiable as it opens down into the Rhine-Main plain. The distances “are all short here. There is not much ground to trade for time and little opportunity for mobile operations. ,

The area forward of the Fulda valley favoured the defence, offering ample choice of good positions for tanks and
ATGW
, with considerable depth to their fields of fire. Unfortunately the distance from the Fulda valley to the frontier is no more than fifteen kilometres.

Behind the Fulda valley to the west is the high mass of the Vogelsberg, to the north the wooded country along the autobahn through Bad Hersfeld to Kassel, to the south the inhospitable terrain of the Hohe Rhon. As a good example of the course of events in a critical sector we shall be giving considerable attention to the action of V US Corps. Its commander’s mission was simple: to keep the Soviet forces east of the Frankfurt plain and as close to the border as possible.

Lieutenant General Harold J. Selby, Commanding General ofV US Corps, was an old hand. Just too young for service in the Second World War, he had got into the Korean campaign right at the end. Later on he had seen plenty of service in armoured cavalry in Vietnam. His total of seven years’ service in Germany had included, besides a tour on the operations staff in HQ
AFCENT
, command of a regiment and of a division before he was given the command of V Corps in 1983.

Each of his two original US divisions had been increased in strength to 15,000 men with over 300 tanks each and nearly 500
ATGW
. In addition to the armoured cavalry regiment deployed along the border in the corps sector there was a further squadron of armoured cavalry in each division. Besides the self-propelled 155 mm and 8-in divisional artillery, each division also had an additional artillery group and nearly fifty anti-tank helicopters. His third division, newly arrived in Germany but containing many officers and men with previous experience in the theatre, was at lower strength and had not yet shaken down, but it was by no means without promise.

The two forward divisions knew their areas well. Each was so disposed as to take care of one of the two most likely axes of attack—to the north of the Vogelsberg through Bad Hersfeld and Alsfeld into the plain north of Frankfurt, and south of the Vogelsberg through Fulda and down the Kinzig river valley through Hanau towards Frankfurt. The corps commander expected action on both axes but was convinced that one or the other would be chosen for the main effort. He knew that his overriding task was to establish the direction of the main thrust before the smaller force opposing it was overwhelmed.

Intelligence here was critical. Since his arrival in the corps the Commander had made a minutely detailed study of the terrain and planned a very thorough intelligence operation covering every approach. What he could not cover with his own sensors he asked to have covered for him by
CENTAG
. To help him find out what he wanted he relied on the reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence resources available at every level of responsibility, from intelligent young men with binocu-lars and a radio in a hole on a hill far forward to the input from highly sophisticated satellite systems in space. The Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (
JTIDS
) had been designed to handle a vast volume of intelligence material coming in from sources as varied as satellite systems, reconnaissance vehicles, both manned and unmanned,
ELINT
(electronic intelligence),
SIGINT
(signal intelligence) and battlefield surveillance of all kinds, and to funnel it all into processing centres for analysis, correlation, assessment and distribution. The corps commander, however, was too old a hand to place exclusive reliance on processes not within his total control and on systems vulnerable to countermeasures. His principal instrument for the assessment of the enemy’s intentions was to be the strong engagement he intended to fight in the covering force area up against the border, forward of the Hanau and Fulda rivers. His final judgement, which, like all fighting soldiers, he knew must in the last resort be purely intuitive, whatever aids he had, would depend on his interpretation of that action,

The armoured cavalry regiment on the border was a powerful brigade-sized armoured force in its own right, basically of light tanks, now reinforced by a medium-tank battalion and a mechanized infantry battalion, together with self-propelled artillery and attack helicopters. Commanders in the covering force had been ordered to destroy leading elements in engagements which should either be opened at extreme range or be held down to very short-range ambush; to force the enemy to commit strong reserves and deploy his artillery; and to give no ground at all except to avoid the imminent certainty of encirclement and total destruction. Small armoured task forces had reconnoitred and in many cases prepared some hundreds of excellent battle positions before the battle began. The Commander was entirely convinced that in the action of the covering forces lay the whole key to success in his main battle. If this action was conducted as he intended, it would in his view both identify the main thrust and give him a little time to organize his response to it. At the same time it would slow down the Soviet surge just enough to cast doubt on the invincibility of the total armoured offensive. This, he thought, could pay a big dividend. The course of events was to suggest that he was right.

II: The View from Rheindahlen

The G3 (General Staff—Operations) Duty Officer in Headquarters, Northern Army Group, still in its peacetime location at Rheindahlen in northern Germany, finished entering in his log the routine call at the half hour to
AFCENT
, while his two juniors in other corners of the map room were already putting together material for the next, and turned again to the letter to his wife. It was just after three o’clock on the morning of the first Sunday in August 1985. The night had been warm and thundery; a brief rainstorm about midnight had done little to freshen it.

There had not been much to report to
AFCENT
. Most of what was important had gone earlier in the night— reports on the army group’s state of readiness, the dispositions at last light of its five component corps, tank and gun states, arrival of reserve units and of reinforcement personnel, the intelligence
SITREP
, and so on.

The general alert ordered in Allied Command Europe on the news of the airborne invasion of Yugoslavia and the follow-up by two Soviet motor-rifle divisions out of Hungary, resulting in an almost immediate clash with US marines, had done curiously little to change things in the Central Region. Events had been moving towards a general alert for some days, though the weight of evidence suggested that an attack by the Pact in the Central

•I Belgian, I German and I Netherlands Corps and land II British. The last, formed largely from reserve units during the previous year. had been deployed for the first time in Germany a month earlier.

Region, if it ever came off, would be most unlikely before the beginning of September and scarcely possible much before mid-August.

A good deal of intelligence material had been coming into the Ops room during the night from the T staff of the British Army of the Rhine (whose C-in-C was also Commander Northern Army Group) but not a lot of it was new. Reports continued, of a sort that had now grown familiar, of preparations in clandestine cells (of which some hundreds were known to exist) for strikes at military and civil communication centres and at other key points throughout the Federal Republic, and for the giving of help to Soviet parachutists coming in on Rhine and Weser bridges. There was the usual wild disagreement on target date and wide discrepancy in detail.

What had not been in doubt for several weeks now, even since before the Yugoslav crisis, was that if the “exercises’ of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, now in progress on a scale far larger than any yet seen, were not in fact a full mobilization for war they were a very passable substitute for it. There had been the usual notification through the head of the Soviet Military Mission to C-in-C
BAOR
(
NORTHAG
, as a
NATO
command, was not recognized by the Russians) of the intention to hold manoeuvres, and of the area in the
GDR
that would be closed, but the areas were of quite unusual size and the exercises were to be of exceptional duration. It was explained by the Soviet Mission that these were “readiness exercises’, normal, but gone through only at long intervals.

The crisis in Yugoslavia and the Soviet intervention there, though neither could be described as entirely unexpected, now threw a clearer light on events. To bring the whole Warsaw Pact gently and unobtrusively, as far as this was possible, to a war footing before an initiative in Yugoslavia (now seen to have been planned some time before) made very good sense. The response of the West to a Soviet attempt to force a disintegrating Yugoslavia back into the system might not be easy to predict, but it was unlikely to be accepted as tamely as the subjugation of Czechoslovakia seventeen years before. Of all the possible reactions, arr invasion of the Warsaw Pact by
NATO
could hardly be seen as likely, however useful the possibility of it might be to the
USSR
for propaganda purposes. It would be important, all the same, for the forces of the Pact to be fully prepared, whether for defensive action against a Western attack or for the more likely contingency of a pre-emptive offensive.

It was in June that the rumours reaching Western intelligence of increasing activity among undercover left-wing groups in the
FRG
began to receive some confirmation from more trustworthy sources. It was clear that plans existed for sabotage on a considerable scale, and even for operations that made little sense unless they were to be supported by military action from the other side.

In early July the evidence began to harden. An action date some time in mid-September was being indicated. But though it was still doubtful whether much could be achieved by sabotage cells acting on their own, there was still no firm indication that a major initiative by Soviet armed forces was intended, the ‘readiness exercise’ notwithstanding.

The Federal Republic of Germany was not unnaturally the first major Allied power to take the aggregate of these reports really seriously, considered in the context not only of current military activity in the Warsaw Pact but also of the confused and threatening situation in Yugoslavia. The United States began to do so at about the same time, and so did Belgium.

The United Kingdom was rather harder to persuade. There had been no alert for several years—not, in fact, since Tito’s departure from the scene—and the British did not entirely believe what they were being totd, largely because they did not want to. The false detente had had its effect. Enough had recently been done within the Alliance, it was generally thought, to prevent the Russians trying anything on. Whatever modi’ fication there had been of recent years in British public opinion, the habit of self-deception, persistent for so many years in Britain, was clearly hard to shake off.

The Dutch were even more reluctant to believe anything so uncomfortable. The Norwegians and Danes flatly rejected the evidence, while the French, still members of the Atlantic Alliance though not, of course, of
NATO
and now under a government of the Popular Front, kept their own counsel.

Troop movement by the
GSFG
(Group of Soviet Forces in Germany) into the designated manoeuvre area began in a spell of good summer weather in the first week of July. Information coming out of East Germany to the West was, as usual, plentiful, and it soon became apparent that these exercises were going to be conducted on a very massive scale indeed—much larger, even, than had been expected. The Red Army and Air Force certainly seemed to be playing it, as the saying goes, for real. Ammunition, fuel and warlike stores were being moved up in actual tonnages. At the same time, in the Soviet Union itself, the arrangements for recall of reservists seemed to be getting a complete work-out and the men were joining their units. The same thing appeared to be happening in all the Warsaw Pact countries.

It was the New York Times that first aroused really widespread misgiving in the West by reporting that what was going on in the Warsaw Pact looked mighty like a mobilization. Two days later the Frankfurter Allgemeine came out bluntly with the statement that that was just what it was. On the same day a journalist regarded by some as the bane of Whitehall and by others as its only hope, a man called Jardine Snatcher, told the world under banner headlines that he was defying D-notices to let it be known that the British Chiefs of Staff had exercised their constitutional right of access to the Prime Minister in order to call on Mrs Plumber in No. 10 Downing Street and tell her precisely that.

Meanwhile, outside Europe, disquieting developments, referred to elsewhere in this book, were causing increasing concern throughout the Western world-above all, not unnaturally, in Washington. Relations between the United States and the communist bloc in the Caribbean were more than usually strained and getting worse. Events in Southern Africa and the Middle East seemed to be moving towards not one crisis but several. In all three areas Soviet activity was open, marked and increasing. One-third of the Soviet submarine fleet was known to be at sea. Units of it, with support vessels, had been reported not only off Cuba and Jamaica but also at Alexandria and in North African waters, as well as off Malta and in the Arabian Gulf. Units of the Black Sea Fleet were known to have been moving in some numbers through the Straits into the Mediterranean. What was no less significant was that Soviet combat aircraft were widely deployed in the Caribbean, as also in Libya, Malta, East Africa and Syria, while there was much movement of transport aircraft.