We have seen how Soviet tactics for the penetration of hostile defences in the non-nuclear variant of the land battle had latterly come to depend upon manoeuvre at least as much as on massed frontal attack. Manoeuvre by mounted infantry demanded both tactical surprise and effective suppression of anti-tank defensive fire. In the battle of the Central Region neither, for the Warsaw Pact, was complete, even on the first day.
Professor J. Erickson, one of the best informed and soundest observers of the Soviet military scene, had said in 1977: ‘Above all the Soviet command will pay the closest attention to the loss-rate in the first 10–15 km of the advance…’ These were prophetic words.
A battle drill to deal with the differing requirements of each combined arms tactical engagement had proved, for the Red Army, impossible to find. When should the infantry dismount? How were the varying speeds of tank, BMP, SP gun and foot soldier to be related? How was the fire of tank, BMP, SP gun, divisional artillery and helicopter gunship, with tactical air support thrown in, to be co-ordinated? The command responsibilities formerly held in the Red Army at division now devolved in greater measure than before on the regiment, which was akin to the Allied brigade, but the heaviest load of all lay on the battalion commander. In a reinforced motor-rifle battalion with a minute staff of four officers, one NCO and eight men, he would be attempting to control a force some 700 strong, with a company of thirteen tanks, a battery of six guns (or even a battalion of eighteen), a mortar battery, anti-air weapons, an ATGW platoon, reconnaissance and engineer elements, thirty BMP, sixty light machine guns and 356 assault riflemen. It was a tall order.
The Allied maxim was a simple one, even if to follow it demanded fortitude: stay put, keep your head down, and go for the commander. He was not all that difficult to locate. The information coming in from many sources, processed in JTIDS and almost instantaneously disseminated, could often pinpoint centres of command at divisional and regimental level. They had then to be attacked, which was rather less easy.
At lower levels the problem was simple. Junior commanders on the NATO side had been taught to look for the command tank. Its behaviour pattern at company level, for instance, gave it a quite unmistakable signature. The temptation to take the easiest shot first was one to be resisted. Take out the command tank; this would not stop the attack but it would at least blunt the follow-through. Battalion command was harder to break, but to take that out was even more rewarding.
Few junior commanders, in the heat and confusion, the clamour and horror, the fear and growing weariness of those battles on the first days, would perhaps have thought of putting it quite that way, but what they were trying to do was to uncouple the parts of an interdependent whole. This would not stop the onrush. To do that in the case of 3 Shock Army would have meant the elimination (or at least the neutralization) of some 120 artillery batteries and 2,800 armoured fighting vehicles (AFV). To hold a single breakthrough on one axis would have meant accounting for some thirty batteries and 800 AFV. What was already just beginning to happen, however, if not on the first day at least towards the end of the second, was the emergence of a hope in those Allied commanders whose nerves were strongest that, if wedges could be driven between the main elements of the Soviet combined arms operation, the enemy might just be prevented from breaking all the way through to the Rhine. There was also now a growing awareness on the other side that to reach it in nine days might not be easy.
What was also beginning to emerge was that a battle seen superficially at the outset as a mainly armoured offensive against an anti-tank defence was becoming more and more a contest between firepower and counter-measures. In an older terminology it would have been called an artillery battle between battery and counter-battery; in newer terms it was seen as a battle between rival arrays of electronics.
On the 5th, after a night in which the pressure had been hardly less than by day, the advance went on. In the north the enemy secured crossings over the Weser north of Minden and leading elements were reported moving west towards the Netherlands. I Belgian Corps had been pushed back west of Kassel; I British Corps was still fighting in the outskirts of Hannover and, in the built-up areas and the hill country of the Harz, exploiting with German reservist Jagd Kommandos the advantage of the ‘sponge’; I German Corps was established east and west along the Teutoburger Wald; II British Corps was extending its left westwards to the Dutch frontier, behind which reserve formations were hastily preparing defences in low-lying country now being flooded.
On the CENTAG front the first of the newly arrived US divisions, which had already fought such a valuable action, had been withdrawn from V US Corps to join the strong Canadian Brigade Group in army group reserve. The First French Army, taking II German Corps under command, had now assumed responsibility for that sector of the region which ran from Nurnberg south to the Austrian frontier, coming for the time being under command to CENTAG, with which French ties, as has been seen, were close.
By the evening of 5 August further enemy attacks had opened a salient on the left of III German Corps, in the extreme north of the CENTAG sector on the Corps boundary with the Belgians, and a Soviet thrust was developing towards Giessen. This was checked by flank action from the V US Corps between Alsfeld and Schluchtern. It was perhaps significant that the leading divisions in the enemy’s assault were now more often motor-rifle than tank divisions, and powerful probing for weak points was tending more and more to replace the massive armoured assault of tanks in the first wave. The Allied tactic, at unit level, which was essentially a matter of striving wherever possible to separate the tanks from their supporting infantry, was clearly paying off.
Further south the anti-tank defences of VII US Corps, with strong artillery and increasing tactical air support, had just been sufficient to contain a major attempt to break through south-east of Frankfurt where pressure was again building up. From Nurnberg southwards the situation was confused, but what information was available suggested that the First French Army with II German Corps was still more or less in control along the Lech.
Over the next five days of bright, clear weather, as growing French strength in the south did much to stabilize the right flank, it became increasingly clear that the main effort would continue to be made in the north. The boundary between the two army groups had been moved up to give the Kassel area, with command of the much weakened I Belgian Corps, to CENTAG. After very hard fighting had held up a determined attempt to push down to Frankfurt through Giessen, COMCENTAG now believed that he had a good chance of holding an area whose forward edge would run from Kassel down through Alsfeld to south of Wurzburg. If the Soviet 3 Shock Army had been put in behind 1 Guards Tank Army the outlook would have been different, but it had been committed to the attack in the north.
By 7 August the continued enforcement of chemical defensive measures upon NORTHAG was beginning to cause concern, and pressure from field commanders for some form of retaliation grew. In theory a nuclear response had always been considered a possibility, at least by the British, but at this stage SACEUR was in no doubt that such a response would be an irrational risk. He was, however, prepared to see chemicals used in retaliation; indeed, authority for their use had already been delegated to local US commanders. SACEUR thus felt able to offer some chemical support to NORTHAG. It presented no problem to COMAAFCE to allot a squadron of US Air Force F-4 Phantoms equipped with spray tanks to 2 ATAF, while a quantity of US 155 mm chemical ammunition was released to the gunners of the British and German divisions of NORTHAG. This capability was put to immediate use.