The Third World War: The Untold Story

by John Hackett

  The mine clearance operation was very costly to the invaders, and they suffered, too, from the guns of the Norwegian coastal forts. What triumphed was dogged persistence: the Soviet naval assault force continued to move ashore, even into the heart of Bodo, landing opposite the hotel belonging to the Swedish civil airline SAS from whose shell-broken concrete tower black smoke was rising. Air attack included chemical weapons. The guns of Northern Fleet warships fired with what seemed an unending supply of shells to cover the merchant transports moving to the quay. Warship and merchantman alike were assailed by Norwegian fast-patrol boats and there was further sinking and damage to vessels at sea. Even so, by the evening of 11 August, sufficient Soviet forces were in and around Bodo to constitute two motor rifle regiments with supplies landed to provide for at least a week’s high activity. A Norwegian brigade was redeployed from Evenes and the British Marine Commando from further north joined them to buttress the Bodo sector. The main road, E6, connecting north Norway to the south, was in danger of being cut.

  On the 12th, word came of the Strike Fleet’s movement eastward through the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. If the aircraft from the carriers could have intervened in the battle over north Norway on that day, the land defence might have been able to stand its ground. But the aircraft could not yet do so. As a fourth Soviet motor rifle division deployed into Troms, complemented by an air assault brigade, the defence began to feel its lack of numbers and, no less vitally, the dwindling of its supplies, particularly gun and mortar ammunition, so heavily used and with so much lost to air attack. Grimly, Commander, North Norway, ordered the withdrawal of the Allied land forces north of Bodo, while he reinforced the lines checking the Soviet force struggling vigorously to reach the E6. By the 14th, he had pulled his little army back.

  En route, several attempts to delay or divert the withdrawal had been made by detachments of the Soviet special forces, wearing Norwegian uniforms, speaking accentless Norwegian. All had been negated by the vigilance and prompt reaction of the Norwegian Home Guard. South of Narvik, for example, one such attempt was dealt with in just under two minutes:

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the elderly Home Guard company commander at Morsvik, challenging a ‘Norwegian captain’ who seemed to be giving contradictory orders to vehicle drivers. The ‘captain’ showed his identity card and told the Home Guard to mind his own business.

  ‘Who sent you here?’ The Home Guard was not going to be shaken off.

  The answer he received was unsatisfactory to him. He ordered his soldiers to close in from the brief summer darkness to cover the ‘captain’ and his two supporters, who abused and threatened by way of response.

  ‘We can soon settle this,’ said the Home Guard. ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Kristiansund.’

  ‘That’s fine, the telephone is working to the south. Give me the name and address of your family or a friend there and we will telephone the local Home Guard. It will only take a few minutes.’

  The ‘captain’ sprang into his car and drove off to the south.

  ‘You’ve let him go,’ said one of the Norwegians deployed on the road.

  ‘Not really. Ole Nilsen’s section is covering the road down there. There’s no other route. He’ll either stop or be shot.’

  There was the sound of rifle fire.

  ‘Ah, he didn’t stop,’ said the Home Guard commander.[13]

  When the field army had withdrawn south, the Home Guard remained behind, drifting into the mountain uplands to continue the war in their own way.

  Meantime, just after midnight on 14 August, a staff officer found Commander, North Norway, in a village close to the E6, to give him this news:

  ‘The Marines have arrived, Sir.’

  ‘The British commando? Surely, they have already moved south.’

  ‘No, Sir, the Americans. They are landing now at Trondheim.’

  ‘With their air wing?’

  ‘With everything.’[14]

  The United States Marines had made many dramatic entries in their distinguished history: none more timely than this. Dedicated in peace to the defence of Norway, a series of events had delayed their despatch by sea and air to their disembarkation area round Trondheim. Some units had been in process of roulement; some had begun deployment to the Middle East only to be halted en route, unloaded and obliged to wait for other transportation back to their bases. But now they were actually forming up on Norwegian soil, the land force together with its important air component. Here was the substance of the counter-attack force that Commander, North Norway, had been seeking to put together. He had already positioned the Canadian brigade groups and Norwegian 12 Brigade — the only two formations that had had a chance to rest and refit during the past twenty-four hours — for such a task but, of themselves, they had insufficient weight of fire power, specialized anti-armour weapons and mobility to destroy the Soviet mechanized forces. With the United States Marine brigade in their midst, they had every chance of accomplishing an important tactical riposte.

  At Trondheim, the port and airfields were working to capacity. The Regional Air Commander was already alarmed at the number of aircraft packing Orland and Vaernes bases — air defence fighters and fighter-bombers from the north, the local complement, now also US Marine Corps squadrons flying in. In consultation with the Commanders of South and North Norway, he arranged for some of this mass of machines to move south to the Bergen air base, Flesland, to Sola at Stavanger and Lista. The remnant of a Norwegian F-16 Fighting Falcon squadron was posted to Rygge, the often battered but yet surviving air station at the southern end of the Oslo fiord.

  These arrangements were getting under way during the following day, 15 August, just at the time that the Deputy Director of Plans, Colonel Romanenko, having received his instructions from his chief, was sending out orders to put his plan for the landings in south-west Norway into effect with the results that we have seen.

  Fairly full details of what had happened had come to CINCNORTH as he returned to Oslo from a visit to Trondheim that afternoon. He had been in the latter city when raids were attempted by Soviet bombers on Orland and Vaernes and had seen these fail. The Soviet raiders, weakened by their encounter with the Swedish Viggens, had entered the Norwegian target area alerted by Swedish radar reports — reports now freely and promptly available from the Swedish authorities — to be defeated by a fighter defence reinforced by the US Marines. The raids on the south-western areas in support of the airborne assault landings had failed similarly. The air transports carrying the parachutists suffered further loss. They eventually landed about two battalions at Flesland and a weak battalion at Sola and Lista, air bases on each of which Ignatiev had expected to settle a strong brigade group. The local field forces, backed by the Home Guard, swept these intruders away by the early morning of 21 August.

  On that morning, too, CINCNORTH learned from his colleague, the Chief of the Norwegian Defence Staff, that the Finns had turned upon the Soviet Forces in their country. Since early in August, the Finnish armed forces had been obliged to aid deployment of the Red army in the passage of formations, ground and air, across their large, empty land. Soviet war regulations had been enforced along these lines of communication, arbitrary demands made for resources of labour and material, war measures introduced such as the blacking out of all lights at night. The Finnish people, conditioned by the prudence of Paasakivi and Kekkonen, had complied to some extent with these requirements. But they were also the same sort of people that Mannerheim had led, a people with a clear idea of individual liberty.

  When the moment came to turn upon the Soviets, it was not done by a signal from above; indeed, it followed a spontaneous act of indignation arising from the arrogant behaviour of the officers of a Soviet logistic control centre. It was not done so much on the basis of attacking a body of waning power but at a time when the Finns could no longer tolerate the position of manifest subservience to which they had been brought. Small though their numbers were, all but a handfu
l turned to fight the Soviet forces, which had seemed to make them a dependency once more.

  This was not quite the last battle for the recovery of territory occupied by the Soviet Union in the northern region. CINCNORTH had gradually been gathering together a land force for the recovery of Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein. The Commander, BALTAP, a Danish officer, driven out of Jutland on the first day of war, had been engaged since his arrival in Norway in planning the liberation of these territories. The British and Dutch Royal Marines were concentrated in south Norway on 18 August, with the Danish and British forces recovered from Zealand. Given the depletion and demoralization of the Soviet occupation forces in the Baltic Approaches, this force overall might just secure and sustain a lodgement in north Jutland under air cover from the airfields of south Norway. The prime limitation was shipping, the only amphibious shipping being the remnant recovered to Norway from the German and Danish navies in the first week of August, to which might be added a slender increment of Norwegian landing craft. It was doubted whether the numbers that these could carry in the first lift could hold territory against a counter-attack mounted prior to the return of the second and subsequent ferrying. Much hinged upon the ability of the Danish Home Guard, now operating as a clandestine and deliberately passive force, to co-ordinate uprising with an Allied landing.

  Although the enemy were depleted in Jutland, CINCNORTH considered them still a force to be reckoned with. An assault landing at this stage would be very risky. He proposed instead a strong raid. The group of CINCEASTLANT’s warships that had escorted the US Marine sea force into Trondheim were available to CINCNORTH for short-term contingency operations. The F-16 Fighting Falcon force at Rygge had been reinforced from Orland and, in the same deployment from that area, the air bases at Lista and Sola had now a notable air defence and ground strike capability. The intelligence provided by the Home Guard indicated that Frederikshavn was vulnerable to a raiding force of about two battalions and a squadron of tanks. This was now scheduled for the evening of 20 August.

  Over the next two days of preparation, the operation seemed to hang in the balance. All the amphibious force was concentrating at Kragero and Kristiansund: could they survive there? Commander, BALTAP’s answer was to put the force to sea; in the circumstances they were as safe in these waters as anywhere. They entered the Kattegat in darkness, a little late, and landed at Frederikshavn early on the morning of the 21st.

  There was a brief struggle with the Soviet garrison before it surrendered. Then, suddenly, the occupation force began surrendering everywhere — to the raiders, who remained, and to the Home Guard who emerged in uniforms with weapons. COMBALTAP sent off more units to join the raiders and then seemed to disappear. A week later he met CINCNORTH in Copenhagen as the latter stepped from his aircraft to call on the Danish Government, restored to their offices and the Christianborg Palace. There was a report in a Swedish newspaper that ran roughly as follows:

  ‘I hear you came down to liberate Zealand personally,’ said CINCNORTH. ‘Is it true that you travelled by train and road through Sweden with the Gardehusar Regiment, and then crossed the Sound, on car ferries?’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ said COMBALTAP (a Dane, as will be recalled). ‘You see, it was a race against time.’

  ‘You mean you were afraid the Soviet troops might…’

  ‘No, not the Soviet troops. I was just afraid that if I didn’t get a move on, Copenhagen would be liberated by those perishing Swedes!’[15]

  He need not, of course, have worried. There had never been any sign of an intention on the part of the Swedes to move into Denmark. Whatever threats lay over Copenhagen, occupation by Swedish troops was not among them.

  Chapter 13 War at Sea

  “The cruiser Krasnya Krim (in Russian Bolshoy Protivopodochny Korabi, meaning “large anti-submarine ship”) sailed from Sevastopol in June 1985, and after passing through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, spent some days in the Eastern Mediterranean before proceeding through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean. The Soviet naval force on station there came for the most part from the Pacific Fleet base at Vladivostok. But the Krasnya Krim had a special mission. After fuelling at Socotra in the Indian Ocean she was to call at the Indian naval base at Vishakhapatnam. From there she would visit Mauritius and then continue round Africa, calling at Angola and Guinea, before returning to the Black Sea early in August.

  The Krasnya Krim’s mission was to test the reactions to her presence within the 200-mile Extended Economic Zones and territorial seas of a large number of the coastal states which were signatories of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in the previous year after a series of conferences which began nearly thirty years before.

  On board, besides her captain and political commissar and some thirty officers and 500 men, was Soviet academician Yuri Skridlov, who had been a member of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations Law of the Sea Conference, meeting in Washington, in Caracas, in Geneva and again in Washington. A man of honesty and high intelligence and a worldwide authority on international law, Professor Skridlov, who combined a strong personality with a deep, if concealed, detestation of Marxist-Leninist humbug, became much liked and respected by all on board the Krasnya Krim, including the political commissar.

  Skridlov introduced a practice of taping items of world news and of regional interest, translating them into Russian and then broadcasting them on the ship’s communication system each evening, with a commentary. Without being openly critical of the CPSU or of the Soviet Union, he nevertheless succeeded in presenting a fair picture of the free world and a faithful account of what was happening in it. The ship’s company of the Krasnya Krim, cooped up for weeks on end, at sea most of the time either steaming slowly or anchored well away from land, was developing a totally new awareness. There was critical discussion of matters which had long been kept out of sight. There was an increasingly vocal expression of discontent with the system under which they lived, compared with the systems operating outside the USSR which they, of course, were either prevented from seeing or were only allowed to see under strict surveillance. The vast majority were young, unmarried conscripts. When the ship left Luanda on 23 July bound for the Black Sea, and home, spirits began to rise. After a short call at Guinea, to fuel, it moved on. It was to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar on 4 August, and the Dardanelles on the 8th.

  On 25 July Professor Skridlov’s News Talk suddenly took on a sharper edge. The captain had received a Top Secret signal, whose contents he felt entitled to divulge to the Professor, warning him of strained relations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The Krasnya Krim was to increase speed so as to pass the Dardanelles on 3 August. This would mean going through the Straits of Gibraltar on the night of 30 July. The Soviet Commander-in-Chief Navy also ordered the ship to prepare “unobtrusively” for war and gave her a sitrep on the naval forces of NATO that might be encountered, as well as the positions of Soviet warships and submarines. It appeared that the US Sixth Fleet might well bar the way to the Dardanelles.

  The events of the next few days on board the Soviet cruiser are by no means clear. What emerges is that Soviet sailors were prepared to take dramatic steps to show their hostility to a tyrannous regime. At 2107 on 30 July the Krasnya Krim, after duly requesting permission from the Flag Officer, Gibraltar, entered British territorial waters and anchored in the Bay. It appeared that the fuel embarked at Guinea was severely contaminated, and it would not be possible for the cruiser to proceed on her way until the entire fuel system had been cleaned. At least, that was what the Soviet High Command was told. It was not what the cruiser’s captain told the Flag Officer, Gibraltar, when he called on him next morning, in company with the political commissar — and the Professor.

  They were convinced that world conflict was now unavoidable and that out of it a new Russia would emerge. The ship’s company had been openly and fully consulted and gave their whole-hearted support to what was now proposed. They wished the ship and
all in her to be granted asylum, fighting neither against their own former comrades nor against NATO, until the conflict was over and they could see more clearly what part to play in the shaping of a brighter future.

  The request was immediately granted, in the first of what was to become a series of defections.

  On 10 August a nuclear missile cruiser, sole survivor of the Fifth Eskadra, or Mediterranean Squadron, of the Soviet Navy also raised the British flag and sailed into harbour at Gibraltar, where she gave the shore battery a twenty-one-gun salute and dropped anchor. The ship’s commander, Captain 1st Rank P. Semenov, appeared before the British Governor in his dress uniform and declared that the missile cruiser was placing itself at the disposal of the British authorities, the entire crew requesting political asylum.

  “Including the political commissars and the KGB officers?” enquired the Governor.

  “No,” replied the Captain. “We’ve strung them up from the masts. Come and see for yourself.” The invitation was declined, the request for asylum granted.

  That same day the Soviet nuclear submarine Robespierre sailed into harbour at Boston, Massachusetts, under the US flag. As the submarine had no masts, there was nowhere to hang the KGB and Party representatives. They had therefore been dropped overboard before entering harbour. The Soviet submarine was disarmed and immobilized, with the crew very comfortably interned.”[16]

  We must now look more thoroughly at the war at sea. A convenient, if somewhat informal, point of entry into this important topic is the text of a lecture given at the National Defence College in Washington by Rear Admiral Randolph Maybury of the United States Navy in the summer of 1986. He was introduced by the Commandant.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen. As you know, we are continuing today with our study of the military operations which took place between 4 and 20 August 1985. Our course has been structured to provide both an “all-arms” conspectus, region by region, and amplifying accounts of the fighting at sea, on land and in the air. Since last winter, when Admiral Lacey addressed us on the naval operations in the Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea — particularly the famous Cavalry reinforcement convoy operation — additional data which have come to hand, and much hard work, have made it possible to present a record of the naval (which includes, of course, naval and maritime air) operations which were taking place concurrently in other areas and theatres. Admiral Maybury, here, has not long since completed this work, and we are most fortunate to have him with us to talk about it. As Deputy Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief US Navy Europe (CINCUSNAVEUR) in London, from 1984 through 1985, he was well placed to see what went on. No doubt he took a hand in things also! At any rate, we’re glad to see you, Admiral — and now will you kindly step up and tell us about it.’