The Third World War: The Untold Story

by John Hackett

  Great emphasis had been placed upon the application of three principles in order to achieve the military aim of the Warsaw Pact, which was the destruction of the armed forces of NATO and its associates. These principles were: surprise, co-ordination of all arms, and concentration of force. Plans had been in existence, constantly updated, ever since Soviet military power had grown sufficient in relation to NATO to confer upon Soviet leaders the option of using it, if favourable circumstances should arise. It was not necessary in the Soviet Navy to risk compromising the contingency plans by any distribution below fleet commander level, and even then the directive was related to a D-day that remained undesignated until D -5. This ensured that no change in the pattern of Soviet naval activities should give NATO early warning of possible attack. On the other hand, every Soviet warship that proceeded outside local areas had to be fully stored for war, and peacetime deployments must not take major units more than five days’ steaming from war stations. Reconnaissance, surveillance and operational intelligence material had to be provided sufficient to support initial war deployments without augmentation, which might reveal unusual activity. Operational command and control of all warships, merchant ships and fishing fleets outside local areas would be assumed on D -1 by the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy in Moscow, where the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief, as Chief of the Main Naval Staff, was ready to assume the control of operations worldwide.

  It seems that the NATO estimate of the main missions of the Soviet Navy in the event of war was not far out. They were: to maintain at instant readiness the SSBN strategic nuclear retaliatory force, and to ensure its security from any counter-measures that might be brought to bear against it; to counter, as far as practicable, the SSBN forces of the USA, Great Britain and France; to destroy or neutralize US carrier air groups, and other major warships; to support the army, both directly by fire power and indirectly by transportation and supply, and by interdiction of enemy military shipping; to interrupt all movement by sea which directly supported the enemy combat capability; and to carry out reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence missions as required in support of the foregoing missions.

  From Soviet records it appears that the following force dispositions had been made in order to carry out the requirements of the naval contingency plan. At any moment during the last week of July 1985 there were eight SSBN, each with sixteen or twenty missiles, on patrol in the Barents Sea and five in the Sea of Okhotsk. From these locations, targets anywhere in the continental USA could be reached. In order to protect the SSBN from the unwelcome attentions of potentially hostile ‘intruders’, the Soviets used diesel-electric ASW patrol submarines, exploiting the acoustic advantage they enjoyed, when running on their electric motors, over the nuclear-powered opposition. There were, of course, shore-based ASW aircraft supporting the SSBN operations, and there was also the input from a comprehensive operational intelligence network.

  The Soviet Union had come to the conclusion that it was not feasible to counter, completely or directly, the opposing SSBN forces of the USA, Great Britain and France. A certain amount could be done, however, to limit the damage to the Soviet Union which a retaliatory strike by SSBN could cause. The only warships earmarked for this purpose were some diesel-electric submarines — six in the Northern Fleet, and four in the Pacific Fleet — whose task would be to lay mines off the SSBN bases. Certain other counter-measures which the Soviets took were not specifically naval, and need not concern us here. They were not in any case very effective.

  It is as well to recall the US/NATO force deployment upon which the Soviet Union had to base its plans — and as has been remarked earlier, the Western powers did not always provide themselves with a valid ‘Moscow view’. By 1985 the US Navy was well into the service life extension programme (SLEP) for its carrier force. This would add fifteen years to the normal thirty-year life of these warships. It was designed to enable the US Navy to have at least twelve carriers in commission for the remainder of the present century. By August 1985 the USS Saratoga and Forrestal had been through the SLEP, and were ‘good as new’; and the USS Independence had been taken in hand by the Philadelphia Navy Yard — that may have seemed tough on the Virginians, but at least Newport News was given the Carl Vinson, CVN-70, to build!

  In a well-publicized comment, around 1981, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, said that he was ‘… trying to meet a three-ocean requirement with a one-and-a-half-ocean navy’. It has to be accepted that, over a period of years, it takes three carriers in commission to keep one up front. Hence, in mid-1985 there were permanently on station a one-carrier battle group in the Mediterranean, a one- and occasionally two-carrier battle group in the Indian Ocean and a one- and occasionally two-carrier battle group in the Western Pacific.

  None was permanently on station in the Atlantic: a Carrier Battle Group Atlantic would be formed from the forces training in home waters prior to deployment for war. Each of the carriers had an air group of about eighty-five aircraft — fighters, strike aircraft, ASW aircraft, both fixed and rotary wing, and one or two aircraft specially fitted for ECM and airborne early warning (AEW). To protect this floating airfield the US had two or three guided-missile cruisers and ten or so modern destroyers and frigates. Quite often, too, there was a nuclear ‘attack’ submarine in direct support.

  The USSR had assumed that the US carriers could launch nuclear strikes, and for this reason had determined that they should be constantly tracked, and targeted by both torpedo and missile firing submarines; and because it was realized that the carriers might take a lot of sinking — or even neutralizing — cruisers and destroyers armed with surface-to-surface missiles (SSM) were also deployed within a day or two of striking distance and developed a pattern of closing in to firing range from time to time. In this way such a movement would not, it was hoped, alert US carriers that war was imminent.

  During this last week in July 1985, therefore, there were two missile-armed and two torpedo-armed Soviet submarines in the Mediterranean, all nuclear powered, and all from the Northern Fleet. Off Newfoundland across the line of advance of the Carrier Battle Group Atlantic were positioned three more missile-armed and four torpedo-armed nuclear-powered submarines, again from the Northern Fleet. This fleet also provided to the west of the Straits of Gibraltar two diesel-electric missile-armed boats, and two diesel-electric ballistic-missile boats were stationed within bombardment range of the NATO air bases as Keflavik, Iceland, and Lossiemouth, Scotland. Other submarines were at sea between their patrol stations and home base in Murmansk.

  The Fifth Eskadra, cruising or anchored in the general vicinity of the carrier battle group of the US Sixth Fleet, consisted of three guided-missile cruisers, four guided-missile destroyers, and four gun destroyers, all from the Soviet’s Black Sea Fleet. Both the US and the Soviet groups were accompanied, of course, by logistic support and, in the Soviet case, maintenance ships in considerable numbers.

  In the Indian Ocean, the Soviets had stationed one guided-missile and three torpedo-attack nuclear-powered submarines to cover the US carrier battle group, but their surface force in that area, consisting of one guided-missile cruiser and three guided-missile destroyers or frigates, tended to remain well out of range.

  Finally, in the western Pacific, where there was a US carrier battle group based usually on Subic in the Philippines, the Soviets were able to muster another group of nuclear-powered submarines, one missile armed and the other torpedo armed while, in addition, there was a diesel-electric guided-missile boat on patrol off Yokosuka in Japan.

  In addition to the submarines and surface forces tasked to destroy; US carriers on station, the Soviet Naval Air Force maintained specially trained and briefed long-range bomber squadrons, armed with stand-off air-to-surface missiles, based at Murmansk, in the Leningrad Military District, and at Sevastopol and Vladivostok. These were mainly Backfires, in support of the Northern and Pacific Fleets, with the shorter-range Blinders in the Baltic and the Bl
ack Sea. The range of both types could be extended by in-flight refuelling. The US carriers and their supporting ships, whose exact positions were always known to the Soviet Union by air, submarine, surface ship and satellite reconnaissance in combination, were liable to air attack anywhere in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the northern part of the Indian Ocean, and in the Pacific from the South China Sea to the west coast of the United States.

  We come now to the Soviet Navy’s dispositions for the support of the Red Army and its Warsaw Pact allies. From the 1970s onwards it had been evident that the Soviet amphibious capability had been increasing, and much interest had been aroused in the autumn of 1981 when exercise Zapad was carried out in the eastern Baltic. At the time there were some who believed that the exercise was designed specifically to bring pressure to bear on Poland, at that time suffering from something of a breakdown in political control by its own Communist Party, under pressure from the powerful Solidarity free trade union movement supported by the Catholic church. But in fact the exercise had been planned over a year previously and we now know that it was a rehearsal for the seizure of the Dardanelles. This accounted for the unprecedented bringing together of the helicopter-cruiser Leningrad, a Sverdlov-class cruiser, two Krivak-class frigates and several units belonging to the amphibious forces of the Black Sea Fleet and the Northern Fleet, plus the latest large landing ship Ivan Rogov from the Pacific, while the carrier Kiev, accompanied by two frigates, was diverted to the Baltic from her passage back to the Northern Fleet base from the Mediterranean. In July 1985 strong amphibious forces, well supported by antisubmarine and anti-air defence and by shore-based air-striking forces, were poised to fight alongside the Warsaw Pact land forces in north Norway, north Germany, Turkey, and in the Far East, while Soviet submarines and naval aircraft were ready to interdict NATO support for its land forces in these theatres.

  When we look at the Soviet plans for the interruption of all movement by sea that directly supported the enemy combat capability, we must at the same time bear in mind the Soviet emphasis, in operational concept, on the achievement of surprise and the coordination of all arms. It must also be remembered that the entire Soviet and Warsaw Pact merchant fleet, as well as the fishing fleet, were under the operational control of the Soviet Government — which meant, once contingency plans were put into effect, the Soviet Main Naval Staff.

  It is now clear that the Soviets had worked out very carefully how and where to apply pressure to the world’s sea transportation system so as to create the maximum disruption in the minimum time, priority being given to denying to the United States and her allies the supply of those imported materials which would have the most immediate effect upon their combat capability.

  The rapid growth of the Soviet merchant fleet in the 1970s and early 1980s had not only earned much-needed hard currency, but had also helped to extend Soviet political influence and provide a most valuable auxiliary force to the Soviet Navy. Not the least of its merits was to furnish accurate, comprehensive and up-to-date intelligence of the world’s shipping movements, the cargoes carried, and their destinations. Certain Soviet merchant ships, also, could lay mines, and many were equipped with electronic warfare devices, for both interception and jamming of radio communications. What the Soviets planned to do, therefore, at the outset of hostilities, was to paralyse shipping movement by executing, as nearly as possible simultaneously, a number of operations involving surface raiding forces, submarine attacks, shore-based air attacks, mining by merchant ships, sabotage, radio jamming and disinformation. ‘War zones’, into which non-aligned and neutral shipping would sail at their peril, would be declared in the western approaches to north-west Europe; west of the Straits of Gibraltar; in the Arabian Sea; off the Cape of Good Hope; and in the East China Sea. This concept of the ‘instantaneous threat’ to shipping, rather than the prosecution of a guerre de course — the old-style war of attrition — accorded well with the Soviet politico-military war plan for a rapid seizure of the Federal Republic of Germany, followed by a peace negotiated with the USA, on the basis of a stunning demonstration of Soviet power on land, at sea, and in the air.

  The Soviet naval and naval air forces available for paralysing shipping, like those allocated for other missions already referred to, had to be in place, or nearly so, long before war contingency plans were executed. Again, therefore, they were bound to be few in number. Western operational intelligence was naturally most interested, in peacetime, in the movements of the Soviet nuclear-powered heavy cruisers of the Kirov class, two of which were in commission in July 1985 — one, the Kirov herself, with the Northern Fleet, and the other in the Pacific. Their ‘electronic signatures’ were well known to the US Navy — and hence to NATO — as were those of all the other main units of the Soviet fleets. It was not, however, too difficult, when the moment came, for these to be artificially altered, so as to confuse — even if only for a day or two — surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Furthermore, the Kirovs, being nuclear powered and extremely well armed, could operate independently and continuously, at high speed, demanding from the enemy a full-scale concentration of force in order to bring them to book.

  Some Kiev-class V/STOL aircraft carriers, of which four were in commission in July 1985, provided the other main element of the Soviet anti-shipping surface force. Two were in the Northern Fleet, including the Kiev herself, and two in the Pacific Fleet. It was normal for either the Kiev or her sister ship the Novorossysk to be operating between the Mediterranean and Murmansk, with occasional cruises to the Cape Verde area, and the west coast of Africa; while the Minsk and her sister ship, based upon Vladivostok, operated between there and Cam Ranh Bay — that bonus to the Soviet union from its support of Vietnam — with periodical sorties into the South China Sea. These carriers were usually accompanied by a pair of the excellent Krivak-class frigates.

  It was often assumed, on the Western side, that if war came the Kirov heavy cruisers would join the Kiev carriers, with perhaps additional frigates or destroyers, to form battle groups similar in concept to NATO battle groups. But this view was mistaken. It overlooked the Soviet determination to achieve surprise, accepting the risk of losing perhaps all of their in-place forces during the first few days, or even hours, of hostilities. Besides, why sacrifice the exceptional mobility of the nuclear-powered Kirovs by grouping them with the logistically-limited Kievs and their escorts?

  As to submarines in the anti-merchant ship role, only two submarines were kept on station in peacetime with this task in mind. They were both elderly, torpedo-firing nuclear powered boats. One of them patrolled within two days’ easy steaming of the Cape of Good Hope, and the other had a billet within the same distance of Cape de Sao Roque, the focal point off Brazil. It was their job to identify and sink particular ships, designated by Moscow, within hours of the opening of hostilities on the Central Front in Europe.

  That, in essence, was the Soviet naval plan. It was a good one, and it very nearly worked.

  Admiral Maybury then continued his talk on the basis of the Soviet naval objectives and dispositions already described, with brief accounts of some selected actions, all of which it must be emphasized were taking place at about the same time. He began with the heavy cruiser Kirov.

  It was known in CINCUSNAVEUR on 1 August that this ship had sailed from the Kola inlet a day or so before and headed south-west towards the middle of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap at moderate speed. From time to time, in the past, the Kirov had proceeded into the Atlantic, west of Iceland, and appeared to be acting as target for Backfire strikes from airfields in the Murmansk area; it was good training, also, for the Soviet maritime reconnaissance aircraft and for satellite surveillance. What was not known, on this occasion, was that the Kirov was accompanied by an Oscar-class nuclear attack submarine, keeping station beneath her, so that her noise signature could not be distinguished from that of the surface ship.

  By 3 August the Kirov was about 350 miles south of Cape Farewell. Suddenly the US
Navy Orion that had been trailing the cruiser detected another echo close to her. The echoes then merged, and after a short while separated. The Orion continued to trail what she felt sure was the cruiser, while the other echo headed south at 20 knots; both echoes were now observing radar and radio silence. It was the Kirov, however, that was heading south. Early on the 4th the cruiser intercepted the British container ship Leeds United, the exact position, course and speed of which had been transmitted to the Kirov by Moscow. The Leeds United never knew what hit her — two SS-N-19 conventionally-armed tactical missiles fired from over the horizon. During the next three days the Kirov destroyed, in the same way, no less than seven Allied ships, all valuable. As none of them managed to transmit an SOS, let alone a raider report, these losses went unnoticed. Kirov’s orders were to continue south towards the Cape Verde Islands where she could replenish with missiles at the Soviet base at Porte Grande. Having already used up all her surface-to-surface missiles (SSM), her capable Captain Fokin decided instead to make all speed back to Murmansk, passing through the Denmark Strait. He knew that the US airfield at Keflavik had been put temporarily out of action by bombardment with submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) specially developed for the purpose, fitted into the old but still operational Golf-class boats. In the event, the Kirov was located by a Canadian Orion, which managed to keep just out of range of the cruiser’s SAM. On 9 August the Kirov was severely damaged by Harpoon attack from the US submarine Dallas, and later sunk by torpedoes from the submarine’s squadron mate, the Groton.

  In the Mediterranean, on 2 August, the Soviet Fifth Eskadra came to its regular anchorage in the Gulf of Hammamet, off the coast of Tunisia; that is to say, the surface ships and their auxiliaries did. The submarines — two Charlie II SSGN (submarine, guided missile, nuclear powered), and two Victor SSN — remained in deep water, a pair consisting of one of each type patrolling to the east and to the west of Malta. On 2 August the Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Southern Europe (CINCSOUTH) and the Commander, Sixth Fleet, agreed that it would be advisable for the carrier battle group, which was already at short notice for sea, to sail from Naples and proceed to exercise south-east of Malta. The Soviet Eskadra was, of course, kept under surveillance. However, the electronic deception of the Soviet force was successful, in so far as the guided-missile cruisers Admiral Drozd, Sevastopol and Admiral Golovko with their accompanying missile destroyers were able to weigh anchor after dark on 3 August and proceed eastwards at high speed without immediately being trailed.