The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  Another member of the company whom Nekrassov had got to know quite well was a funny little rifleman, from Kazan on the Volga, called Yuri Youssupof, who was also carried in the company commander’s BMP. Nekrassov had said a kind word to this man soon after his arrival as a reservist, something which so startled a simple and lonely youth very far from home, completely baffled by what went on around him, that he attached himself to Nekrassov from then on in an almost dog-like devotion. Junior officers in the Red Army had no personal servants but it was customary for one of the rank and file to be made available for small services to an officer, to enable him to get on with his job without minor distraction. In No. 3 Company Yuri thus became the Senior Lieutenant’s personal orderly, trying to see that he got something to eat and somewhere to sleep, longing in his simple way to be able to do more for one of the very few people, since he was torn from his family and friends, who had treated him as a human being.

  At this time Nekrassov’s company, to which six new men had come yesterday, was still eight under its authorized personnel strength. Three such companies, together with a battery of 82 mm automatic mortars with a maximum rate of fire of 120 rounds per minute,* at either low or high trajectories, made up the motor rifle battalion. Three of these battalions, plus a battalion of tanks, an artillery battalion, and six other separate companies - reconnaissance, air defence, multiple rocket launcher, communications, engineers, and transport - formed the regiment. The other two of the three infantry regiments in 197 Motor Rifle Division were organized on the same lines but, instead of BMP, which were fighting vehicles, were equipped with armoured transporters (BTR), thus making up in the whole division one heavy and two light regiments of motorized infantry. In addition, the division contained one tank regiment, one self-propelled artillery regiment (now incorporating a battalion of BM-27 multi-barrelled rocket launchers), an anti-aircraft rocket regiment and several other battalion commands, a reconnaissance unit, a communications unit, a rocket (FROG 7) unit, an anti-tank unit (IT-5), engineers, chemical defence, transport, repair and medical. There would also be two or three KGB battalions attached to the division.

  * This formidable new weapon was carried in a BMP, whose back door let down to form the mortar base plate. The bomb weighed 4 kg and was carried in packs of five, ninety rounds travelling with the mortar, with further ammunition in a back-up armoured load carrier. It could not, of course, be kept in sustained action at maximum rate of fire, any more than the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, which could fire in one minute all the ammunition the rifleman carried. A pack of five rounds fired off in ten seconds would represent an average engagement for the 82 mm automatic mortar.

  The 197 Motor Rifle Division was due on the morning of 7 August to relieve 13 Guards Motor Rifle Division, which now for three days had been making slow progress against I British Corps.

  Even before it had crossed the boundary between the two Germanies to move up into the battle in the Federal Republic, 197 Motor Rifle Division, whilst still 50 kilometres to the rear in the second echelon, had come under heavy NATO air attack, with quite considerable losses. Personnel casualties were, as usual, recorded with neither promptness nor exactitude. The breakfast ration brought up for No. 3 Company, Senior Lieutenant Nekrassov’s, which had lost more men than most from air attack, was therefore issued as for a company up to strength.

  The Sergeant Major poured out double the prescribed summer ration of 100 grams of vodka for Nekrassov and gave him two biscuits instead of the regulation one.

  ‘A little more vodka, perhaps, Comrade Senior Lieutenant?’ A solicitous fellow, the Sergeant Major.

  ‘No, to hell with that. We’ll drink it this evening if we’re alive.’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed the Sergeant Major, tipping his own double ration down a well-trained throat. He would have liked more, but did not care to take it without the officer’s permission.

  ‘How are the men?’

  ‘Hungry, Comrade Senior Lieutenant. And pretty savage about it.’

  ‘Savage is no bad thing. Everything ready?’ Nekrassov adjusted his throat microphone.

  ‘Yes, Sir!’

  ‘Then let’s go.’ He gave the order.

  At once No. 3 Company came to life in a stutter of starting engines and in its ten BMP moved off into a misty dawn and an uncertain future which no one in the company found particularly attractive.

  THE BALANCE OF POWER - Chapter 3: The State of the Alliance

  The resolve and the military capability of the West had since 1918 been sapped by an uncritical hankering for peace. It was hardly surprising that after the war of 1914-18, in which the full potential of highly developed industrial nations was for the first time totally applied to the destruction of national enemies, a deep and widespread revulsion against war set in. The tide of pacifism in the 1930s, particularly in war-scarred Europe, was running strongly, fed by a genuine emotional concern which often blinded quite sensible people to what should have been obvious. Some strange aberrations resulted. At a time when Hitler’s long march in Europe had already begun, for example, the annual Labour Party Conference in Great Britain voted not for the reduction of the Royal Air Force but for its total abolition.

  On the other side, the nature and the purposes of peace were seen rather differently. ‘Peace,’ said Lenin, ‘as an ultimate objective simply means communist world control.’ The policy of the USSR, both internally and externally, from the end of the First World War to the outbreak of the Third, was not only wholly consistent with this principle. It was consistent with no other. The Third World War was its inevitable consequence.

  There were, of course, plenty of Marxists around, in the West as well as the East, to whom Lenin’s dictum would be no more than an axiom. There were also Western artists, writers and other intellectuals in the 1930s who enthusiastically embraced communism, since it seemed to offer to suffering humanity real hope for a better world. Some of them claimed later that they had been misled as to the true nature of communism and its methods. This was a claim received on the whole with scepticism.

  There were also many honest folk who were simply sickened by the very thought of war, with its savage and appalling slaughter and its apparently mindless cruelty. Among them those whom Lenin described as ‘useful fools’, and found so helpful for the purposes he had in mind, occurred in some numbers. In free and generous societies they flourish in abundance.

  After the Second World War, which was in some ways little more than a continuance of the First, a new and dreadful danger appeared in the weapons of mass destruction which men had been clever enough to invent, and to manufacture, but which mankind was neither wise enough nor good enough to be trusted with.

  It was Soviet policy to move in and exploit, to the advantage of the USSR, fears found everywhere of nuclear annihilation. The so-called ‘peace movements’ of the Western world were one result, unobtrusively orchestrated and largely paid for by the USSR, with maximum utilization of Lenin’s ‘useful fools’, who were often men of impeccable respectability and even occasionally of some distinction. Peace movements flourished in the fifties. This was the time of the Stockholm Appeal and the World Peace Council and other manifestations that were discreetly directed from Moscow and generously financed through the so-called Peace Fund. The principal target of all such peace offensives was the United States of America.

  It is hard nowadays, when so much is known of the manoeuvres of the deeply dishonest regime under which the Soviet Union suffered for more than half a century, to believe that people in other lands not under its imperial dominion could be so foolish. The Soviet Union had, since the end of the Second World War, annexed and enslaved three free nations on the Baltic coast (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia); bound two other nations (Belorussia and the Ukraine) in unwilling servitude; continued to massacre its own people to maintain the supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); imposed harsh and unwelcome regimes by force in Eastern Europe; financed and organized subversion in dem
ocratic countries which, though ripe for the plucking, were too far from its frontiers to invade; built a wall across part of Europe, with mines and guns and dogs, not to keep miscreants out but unwilling citizens in; invaded Afghanistan; behaved towards the inhabitants of the Soviet Union with a savagery which passes description; lied and tricked and cheated wherever it found advantage in dishonesty . . . and yet, so great were Western fears of nuclear war that, adroitly handled, these fears could be turned to suspicion and dislike of a nation whose leaders were the elected choice of the people, with no history of the massacre of millions behind them, still less of the enslavement of nations - the United States. It would be foolish to claim that there are no weaknesses in Western democracy. Ugly faults abound on every side, sometimes so monstrous as nearly to drive sensitive and intelligent observers to despair. But it was the height of absurdity to suggest that, whatever the weaknesses of the parliamentary democracies of the West, the grim, implacable, repressive incompetence of a Marxist tyranny would be preferable, that the policies of the Soviet Union were the only real source of world peace and that the only real threat to it lay in those of the United States. Yet this was the message put across by Soviet propaganda and spread by its agents, whether they knew what they were doing or not.

  The 1980s opened to a swift crescendo in the orchestration of anti-nuclear protest. Mass rallies were organized in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, and the United States, in every one of which it was America that was cast as the villain of the piece. ‘Reduce the arsenal of the warmongering West,’ was the cry, ‘and give the peace-loving Soviet Union and its devoted associates the opportunity and the example to reduce their own.’ There were, it can be confidently asserted, no such demonstrations at all in the cities of the USSR.

  The adroitness with which Lenin’s useful fools were exploited, and the degree to which the genuine fears of honest people were turned, in the Soviet interest, to the obstruction of their own governments was almost unbelievable. Eventually, common sense began to win back ground abandoned to hysteria. The hollowness of the unilateral nuclear disarmers’ arguments showed up ever more clearly and the gross travesty of truth which laid the blame for increasing armaments, particularly in the nuclear field, solely upon the United States was less uncritically accepted. By the summer of 1983 the scene was calmer, and though much damage had been done this was not irreparable. The Soviet Union’s peace offensive did not, in the end, cripple Western defensive efforts as completely as those who mounted it had hoped.

  It must also be said that the public disquiet aroused by the growth of nuclear arsenals at the disposal of both superpowers did something, on the Western side at least, to alert governments to the necessity to explain fully to their own publics what was being done and why, instead of simply assuming that they could pursue these dramatic defence policies without any questions being asked. In the Soviet Union, of course, the problem never arose.

  In addition to the general malaise which it created, nuclear policy was one of the causes of disunity between the Western allies, but by no means the only one. Another was something as vague as the difference in style between the actions of government on the two sides of the Atlantic. The uncertainty and soft centre of the Democratic presidency gave way in a single election to the hard-line and defiantly stated policies of a Republican era, even though there was still a marked lack of consistency between the policies announced from one day to the next. Neither style was attractive to the European leaders, with the partial exception of Britain’s Prime Minister. They preferred on the whole a more patient and consistent approach to policy-making, weighing one thing with another and often having to agree on more balanced and less adventurous policies than some of them would have liked, as the price for reaching agreement within the European Community. The latter as an instrument of policy in the world had never recovered the ground lost in the failure of the European Defence Community and the European Political Community in 1954. Much time had subsequently been wasted in trying to re-create institutions which would have replaced these brave efforts at the formation of a United States of Europe. The nationalist obsession of General de Gaulle, followed by the less blatant but equally damaging half-heartedness of Britain with regard to any positive move towards a new structure for Europe, had led to the spending of more time in the Community on what can literally be described as bread and butter issues than on the discussion of how Europe could wield a degree of influence in the world commensurate with its economic strength and the importance of its worldwide interests.

  It was not until 1981 that the Genscher-Colombo proposal, supported behind the scenes by the Action Committees for the Union of Europe, showed the way to a new mechanism and a new act of political will. By adopting this proposal in 1983 the members of the Community, soon to be increased by the adherence of Spain and Portugal, equipped themselves with a capability for making decisions and an embryonic apparatus for putting them into effect. The great merit of this proposal lay in accepting things more or less as they stood, namely that the European Council, consisting of the heads of government of the member states of the Community, had set itself up as the top decision-making body both for matters within the normal operations of the Community and, more important for our present purpose, for the making of decisions in matters of foreign policy jointly between the governments of the member states. And now it had finally succeeded in adding to its tasks the search for identity of view in defence policy and co-operation between the armed forces of the Community’s members.

  This was achieved through two kinds of measures, both of which seemed quite simple when they had been done but to get them done had required a leap of the imagination over the institutional hurdles which the theorists of the Community had placed in the way of any such pragmatic development. The European Council made an Act of Union declaring that it constituted a unified authority for whatever purposes it might choose then or later. It also decided to set up new secretariats for the preparation and execution of decisions in the fields of foreign policy and defence. Foreign policy had previously been co-ordinated, and so far as possible harmonized, by means of an impermanent bureaucracy consisting of the officials of the state which was furnishing the presidency of the Community at the time. As this changed every six months, continuity was difficult to ensure and efficiency suffered.

  It was clear as soon as the decision to include defence matters in the activities of the Union had been taken that such an arrangement was totally inadequate. Defence decisions have either to be taken a long time in advance, owing to the time needed for the working out of operational doctrine upon which requirements for military equipment are based and then the long lead-times in its production, or alternatively have to be taken under heavy pressures in a very short time in some emergency or crisis requiring common action. A basic minimum of staff is required both to monitor the long-term processes and to prepare the data and intelligence material (for example, information on force dispositions) necessary for the taking of emergency decisions within the Alliance and for crisis management. The logic of this argument was in the end enough to overcome French hesitations, while Britain finally accepted that in order to maintain the levels of defence which the Conservative Government judged necessary, without offending its monetarist principles, some radical means of obtaining greater cost-effectiveness must be sought. The only available route to this objective lay through co-operation with the other states of Western Europe both in the production of armaments in common, with a far higher degree of standardization, and by the acceptance of a certain degree of specialization in the roles of the armed forces of member states. No dramatically swift results could be expected from this new institutional arrangement but at least it provided a framework in which improved and better shared planning could take place, once the essential decision had been taken to improve the conventional strength of the European forces in the Alliance in the circumstances which will be described below.

  In addition to the disu
nity within the European Community, there had been a continuing rumble of disagreement between Europe and the United States over the roles that they should respectively or together play in protecting their interests throughout the world. These differences had been expressed with particular sharpness over the subjects of nuclear policy and the Middle East. The nuclear argument was frustrating to the Americans since they had believed that in the production and deployment in Western Europe of modernized long-range theatre nuclear forces (TNF) they were acceding to the wishes of the Europeans, who felt themselves threatened by the installation in the territory of the Soviet Union of improved systems obviously targeted on Western Europe. The resolution of this particular and vital difference of opinion was at least partially achieved by the opening of serious negotiations with the Soviet Union in late 1981 followed by the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) which are described in the next chapter; partly also by a reassessment of the proper role of the European defence effort within the Atlantic Alliance, which is more immediately germane to what follows. While it was perfectly right and proper that the Europeans should wish to have on their territory nuclear missiles equivalent to those facing them from the other side, or to try to negotiate for the abolition or reduction of such weapons on both sides, the acceptance of this did not begin to deal with one of the cruellest dilemmas with which Western statesmen might find themselves faced: namely the choice whether to be the first to use nuclear weapons if they were unable to hold off attack by conventional Soviet forces in Europe.

  The new TNF were logically required as part of the general scheme of deterrence which had worked so well ever since the acquisition of a nuclear capability by the Soviet Union, on the general principle that like can only be deterred by like. The popular agitation against the stationing of these weapons in the territories of Western European states was therefore misconceived, as was apparently perceived by the great majority in those countries who did not accept that the example of unilateral disarmament given by the West would be followed by the East. The raising of this issue in the public debate led at last, however, to the focusing of attention on the much more real and difficult problem inherent in the doctrine of flexible response. This included the proposition that in certain circumstances, that is to say in the event of a Soviet attack by conventional forces in Europe which could not be successfully stopped by the conventional forces of the West, the choice would have to be made whether to allow the attack to succeed and vast areas of Western Europe to remain in Soviet occupation, or whether limited and selective use of nuclear weapons should be authorized by the West in order to impose a halt on the military operations. This would afford a pause in which an attempt might be made to end the dispute, at the same time advertising the readiness of the West to escalate to whatever degree might be necessary in order to prevent a Soviet victory.