The Third World War (51 page)

It was generally agreed that they would all form a joint delegation to the Helsinki Conference, and at the same time work out the modalities of separation. Needless to say, the violent transition from a centralized autocracy to multiple nationhood was not everywhere achieved in an orderly manner. Not all the republics were geared to establish their own administrations, and many had deficient economic resources. The enormous problem of disposing of the former Soviet forces, in Europe and Africa and the Middle East, was being handled by
UNRRO
.

The Conference, as is the way of conferences, proliferated into a whole series, some of which are still continuing, and it would require another volume of this history to do justice to all these deliberations. The collapse of the
USSR
meant the end of large-scale hostilities in Europe. It did not mean universal peace.

Conflicts which the Soviet Union did not start, but which it studiously sought to sharpen and exploit, have yet to be resolved. Fighting still goes on. The pattern of the successor states into which the
USSR
seems now to be dividing has yet to be fully determined. There are differences between the countries which, under their former regime, were all members of the Warsaw Pact. There are also differences between each one of them and the member states of the Western Alliance, with which they have so lately been at war. To settle all these differences will take time and will be far from easy. Meanwhile, there is still warfare outside Europe. No doubt it will continue, in one way or another, for some time, with whatever resources (and much material has been left behind by the Russians) the belligerents can find. The Third World War, however, can be fairly said to

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p.

have ended with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in late August 1985 and the cessation of direct hostilities between the major powers. We have already taken a brief glance at how the world then looked, and in the concluding chapter we look a little into the future. Something more should now be said about what might have happened and did not, about certain contributory factors to the outcome and about some, at least, of the conclusions that can be drawn from these events.

What especially distinguishes the scene we now see about us—and this is something to which we shall only be able to grow accustomed with the passage of time—is the absence from it of the powerful, restless,’ baleful, expansive, intractably dogmatic imperialism of Soviet Russia.

The world has come out of another bad dream, just as it did out of the Nazi nightmare. This one lasted rather longer. The myth born in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 persisted, before it was dispersed, for nearly three-quarters of a century. It was the myth of the emergence of true democracy from a proletarian explosion, when what had really taken place was the murderous overthrow of a democratically elected government by a fanatical authoritarian minority.

It is argued by some that the basic contradictions of Marxism-Leninism would inevitably have caused, in time, the downfall of any state built on it. Whatever Karl Marx may have contributed to nineteenth-century thought his political philosophy is held by many today, a century later, to be unscientific, romantic and obsolete, no more useful as a guide to government in the twentieth century than the novels of Charles Dickens as a reflection of life today in England. Indeed, if the revolutionary genius of Lenin had not harnessed to the advancement of Marxism a huge and backward group of peoples accustomed to absolutism—most of them Asiatic and some still semi-savage—it might have been consigned to the dustheap of history long ago, and this particular nightmare might never have occurred at all. The nightmare is now over, and we shall never know if the
USSR
, given time, would have fallen apart by itself or not, without the war it brought about. There may be other nightmares still ahead.

It has been suggested with some plausibility that in addition to the conjunction of miscalculation and mischance which triggered off the explosion of August 1985 there had long been a growing awareness among the rulers of the
USSR
of increasing strains within the Warsaw Pact, within the Soviet Union itself, which could hardly be contained without a signal military victory over the capitalist West. There had also been, among the top people in the regime, a very real fear of Germany. There had even been some fear of the capacity of the Federal Republic to lead the West (and above all the United States) into an aggressive war against the communist Ea’st. This was a fear which West German insistence on ‘forward defence’ (whatever that might mean—and it clearly meant different things to different people) did little to abate. It was for all that little but the product of the Soviet Union’s own propaganda.

The real causes of this war between the Eastern and the Western blocs will long be matter for debate. Whatever they were the fighting could not, -it now seems, find its resolution (if it did not move into the strategic exchange of weapons of mass destruction, which would have emptied the concept of ‘resolution’ of all meaning) anywhere but in Europe. Its focal point could be nowhere but in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The critical point in the military action was therefore bound to be, at least as far as the battle on and over the land was concerned, in what was designated in
NATO
as the Central Region of Allied Command Europe.

What also seems beyond doubt is that the Soviet plan to penetrate the Northern Army Group, cross the Rhine in the Low Countries, and roll up
AFCENT
by an offensive thrust from north to south along the west bank of the Rhine, which would haven taken
CENTAG
in the rear, came very close to success. It was well conceived and well prepared, with a not unreasonable assessment of the difficulties involved. This particular plan was an element in a genera! structure of contingency planning, any one part of which was valid in itself though none was likely to be implemented in isolation. It was the unexpectedly strong Western response to the Soviet intervention in Yugoslavia which pulled the chocks out, as it were, and set the plan for the invasion of the Central Region rolling down the slipway to the launch.

What might have happened in the long run if this plan had come off is quite incalculable. It can be said with complete confidence that in the shorter term it would have brought about the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany, and that the Atlantic Alliance would in consequence have lain in ruins. The possibility of a counteroffensive by the United States, in these circumstances, can hardly be conceived. The situation would have been beyond repair.

The bogey of an all-out attack on Allied Command Europe by forces of the Warsaw Pact, planned in total secrecy and carried out with complete surprise by forces already in place, with the aid of massive undercover operations prepared with absolute security, was not the sort of thing to give sensible men sleepless nights in the years before the war—though it might not have been sensible wholly to disregard the possibility. Much more likely. Allied planners thought, was what actually happened: the implementation of well-prepared contingency plans, involving a high degree of preparation, as crises developing elsewhere showed signs of moving out of control.

Unlikely though it may have been, a surprise attack in the late seventies by in-place forces of the Warsaw Pact would have found Allied Command Europe so ill prepared that its early success could hardly have been m doubt, whether the French came in on the Allied side or not. The US Army in Europe had not yet fully recovered from the Vietnam experience. It was becoming accustomed to the absence of the draft but was already running into serious and unexpected difficulties over reserves as a result of ending it. Stocks which had been run down for the Israeli war were only slowly being replaced. The ‘Reforger’ system, by which formations would be flown in from the continental United States to marry up with equipment prestocked in the Federal Republic, though already showing great promise, had not yet been as fully developed as in the years to come.

The Bundeswehr was improving, but although its units were rated by the Russians as the best of the Allied bunch it was still only in moderate shape by the exacting standards of German professional soldiers, while the German Territorial Army was scarcely more than embryonic.

The British Army of the Rhine was again in the throes of reorganization, with the level of provision (and the state) of its equipment causing concern to its officers and with several battalions of its invaluable infantry still in Northern Ireland. The forces for defence in depth in
NORTHAG
, when the inevitable breakthrough occurred and there was no release of Allied nuclear weapons (which would almost certainly have been withheld), were wholly inadequate.

Belgian and Dutch forces were heavily—and dangerously—reliant on reservists with no more than short conscript training behind them, and were still reluctant (particularly in the case of the Dutch) to maintain any considerable strength in proximity to their forward battle stations in the Federal Republic. There was very little hope that in the event of a surprise attack Dutch forces of any real significance would have been able to reach their emergency positions before these were overrun.

The Allied air forces were still ahead of those of the Warsaw Pact in quality of equipment, though the gap was closing. They were also well ahead in the quality of their aircrew, but among the European Allies air forces had been ruinously run down. Air defence with surface weapons, even in Allied Command Europe, was nowhere strong. Some of the equipment was good. The British low-level Rapier, for instance, was outstanding. There were in 1977 only two Rapier regiments in
BAOR
, however, neither of which was armoured or even tactically mobile. The air defence of Great Britain, upon which so much would depend, was particularly weak. It was almost as rundown as the UK’s civil defences against air attack, whether by conventional weapons or nuclear.

Invasion from a standing start in the late seventies, if it had ever been tried, would almost certainly have brought the Russians to the Rhine in a very few days—unless
NATO
employed nuclear weapons. What would have happened then is anyone’s guess. A high probability would have been swift escalation into the strategic nuclear exchange which would very soon have rendered the land battle in Europe largely irrelevant.

Deliberate all-out attack with complete surprise from a standing start, it must be repeated, was always unlikely. The more probable way in which it was thought in the West that a war in Europe would be likely to break out was just the way it did. What happened to start it off in 1985 could have happened, in one way or another, much earlier.

If the crisis of 1985 had occurred in 1977, say, or even in 1978, it is, as we have seen, scarcely conceivable that the Soviet plan for an advance to the Rhine, the dismemberment of the Alliance and the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany could have failed given the state of preparedness of the Allies at that time.

What was done in the years between 1978 and 1984 was enough to prevent this. The tale of it has already been referred to in outline. It is told more fully, using Britain as a test case, in Appendices 1 and 3.

The advantages of the military structure formed to function in peacetime—a quite unique feature of the Atlantic Alliance—have become ever more abundantly clear. Without
NATO
as a framework the individual efforts of the Allies would have been of little account and much less effective in the aggregate. Within
NATO
the contributions of the Allies, though incompletely co-ordinated, added up to far more than the sum of the parts. In these years the United States came out of its post-Vietnam trance. Great Britain threw off some of the illusions which had flooded into the vacuum left by the disappearance of an empire. The Federal Republic ceased to be mesmerized by the success of its economic miracle and the allure of a welfare state. Even Belgium and Holland, though late and incompletely, began to show some awareness that the Soviet Union was already in a position to meet and master a real crisis and would welcome a showdown with the capitalist West, and sooner than later at that-Throughout
NATO
there was a growing tendency to face and accept defence responsibilities, nowhere more clearly shown than in a steady rise in readiness, an improvement in reinforcement capabilities and a striking advance in anti-tank and air defence.

The miscalculation over the possible participation of France was a major blunder on the Soviet Union’s part at the very outset. In the sphere of grand strategy the Soviet Union was soon to be in deeper water still. It was attempting to handle an almost worldwide problem of war command, with operations proceeding simultaneously from Bodo in Norway to Berbera in Northeast Africa, from the Caribbean to the Caucasus. This was beyond the powers of the centralized system of control on which the regime depended. Only a degree of independence in command which was wholly foreign to it, and to which Soviet commanders themselves were completely unaccustomed, could have enabled peripheral commands to retain the initiative without which they were bound to fail.

At the tactical level, a very similar point applied. The Russians were attempting to apply a battle-fighting method which demanded a degree of independence in junior leaders which it had been a major interest of the Marxist-Leninist system to discourage.

The battle-fighting method itself was on the whole unremarkable. What was hailed in the West by some in the late seventies as a tactical revolution in the Red Army, the conversion from mass attack to manoeuvre, from the shock of frontal assault to the ‘deep thrust’ and the ‘daring raid’, was neither so novel nor so radical as was thought. What was being developed in Red Army tactical practice was the action of combined arms, co-ordinated and commanded at a lower level than was customary. This marked a shift of emphasis which showed up weaknesses none the less. The
BMP
, designed for the nuclear battlefield, was found not to be the best combat vehicle for the carriage of infantry supporting armour in a non-nuclear battle. It was in the process of being somewhat hesitantly replaced by a better vehicle, the
MTLB
, when war broke out. The problems of interrelating combat elements with different speeds and other characteristics remained unsolved.