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.
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,[2] 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 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 ‘I’ 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, an 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 told, 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 modification 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.
2
I Belgian, I German and I Netherlands Corps and I and 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.