SACEUR was alone and on the spot, and he knew it.
Shortly before midnight, Central European time, on Monday 12 August, the President came up on a voice channel. Satellite communications had not yet been fully restored and visual channels were still far from reliable, but it may also have been that the President preferred an exchange by speech alone.
‘Can you do it?’ he asked.
The question was a very simple one but nothing more was necessary.
There was a momentary pause.
‘It all depends,’ the Supreme Commander answered, ‘on what is happening in the Atlantic — and whether the air bridge holds.’
‘The air bridge still seems to be holding,’ was the response. ‘We shall know what has happened in the Atlantic in a very few hours.’
What was known already was that four transatlantic convoys bringing from the United States almost the entire heavy equipment and the remaining personnel of two complete corps, already largely lifted in by air, had set out on 8 August and had very soon run into persistent and determined Soviet attack, both from submarines and from the air. Losses were already heavy. Nearly a fifth of the transport shipping had been sunk, with considerable loss to escorting naval forces. Many survivors had been rescued but the sum of the equipment lost — the XM-1 tanks, SP guns, APC, soft-skinned transport, electronic equipment and, above all, munitions, especially for air force weapons and anti-tank and anti-air missiles — represented for the time being a quite serious, if happily only temporary, setback to the Allied war effort.
The personnel for these reinforcing formations, numbering in all some 70,000 officers and men, had already for the most part been moved in over the air bridge to the United Kingdom and northwestern France. Considerable use had been made of impressed civilian air transport, and here too there had been losses. Nearly a tenth of the passenger-carrying aircraft bringing over US military reinforcement personnel had been brought down into the sea. The rescue rate of survivors had been high, but this nevertheless represented a setback too.
Troops on the ground in Western Europe were now waiting for the equipment, in all its huge complexity — from a main battle tank to some tiny triumph of electronic micro-processing — without which they could not even approach the battlefield, let alone fight on it. How much of what was wanted would arrive, and what formations SACEUR would be able to put into the critical battle now being fought for the future freedom of the Western world, depended largely on how soon the shipping making its way eastwards across the Atlantic could be brought under land-based air cover from Great Britain and France, within the UK Air Defence Region.
CHAPTER 16: Sea Power
The course of events at sea, immediately following upon the Warsaw Pact incursion into NATO territory on 4 August 1985, is not easy to follow in detail. The overwhelming need to preserve secrecy about their intentions, and the full exploitation of surprise, were reflected in the sparseness of Soviet and Warsaw Pact records, when these became available. On the NATO side it was all that the exiguous staffs could do, once war seemed imminent, to begin to put into effect the complex Alliance plans which had been prepared for just such a contingency. The detailed record disappeared with the miles of telex tape which had to be disposed of as quickly as it accumulated; critical decision-making by telephone and closed-circuit TV was also lost to the record; only the main features of the naval and maritime air operations can be established with reasonable certainty.
From the start-line to 2 Guards Tank Army, on the Elbe near Lubeck, to Flensburg, at the Baltic Exists, is 150 kilometres. By dawn on Monday 5 August, the Russians were there, and the Kiel Canal was in their hands.
The reorganization of the main NATO naval command structure (see Appendix 3) had been the occasion for a thorough review of the maritime aspect of NATO strategy, its concept of operations and its plans. The NATO Joint Allied Command Western Approaches (JACWA) had called for reaffirmation by the NATO Military Committee, the NATO Council of Ministers, and finally the NATO governments, of three cardinal elements in NATO strategy. First, that there would be no change in the determination of NATO to offer the stoutest possible resistance on land, as far forward as possible. Second, that NATO would remain flexible in regard to the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. Third, that the primary maritime task of NATO would be to ensure the safe and timely arrival in Europe of seaborne reinforcements and supplies from North Africa and elsewhere.
JACWA, in developing their plans, had to bear in mind certain considerations arising from the new command structure and relevant to NATO strategy. These were:
1 The fundamental purpose of NATO, as a military alliance, was to preserve the territorial integrity, political independence and economic strength of its member states.
2 The major member of the Alliance, the United States, had national security requirements of critical importance besides those of NATO. In particular, her strategic nuclear weapons were not, except for a few SSBN (submarines, strategic ballistic nuclear), committed to NATO.
3 The British Polaris SSBN force, though it was committed to NATO, could in certain circumstances revert to British national control.
4 The major problem of command and control (apart from disruption of the electronic environment in wartime) would be to conduct operations effectively across the interfaces between JACWA and SACLANT to the west and north, and between JACWA and SACEUR to the east and south.
5 It had become glaringly obvious that if the margin of Warsaw Pact numerical superiority over NATO continued to increase in all arms, accompanied by technological equivalence and even advantage in some cases, the initial shock of Pact aggression in Central Europe might well carry its forces to the Baltic Exits and the North Sea coast. The lack of depth in the NATO defensive position on land, therefore, would necessitate, in the early stages of a conflict, the inclusion of the British Isles as the ‘rear area’ for the Central Front. Later, Britain would become a springboard for the counter-offensive. The closest possible understanding between command at sea and on land, between JACWA, SACLANT and SACEUR, would therefore need to be established and maintained.
6 In order to get the essential seaborne supplies and reinforcements from North America safely to Europe when required, SACLANT and JACWA would have to co-ordinate their strategy and operations closely, and give each other full support at all times.
7 The special character of the Western Approaches command, comprising naval forces (surface, air and submarine), maritime air forces and UK air strike forces, would have to be continually borne in mind. It was to be a 3-D team. The key point was that warships move at about 500 miles per day, aircraft at about 500 miles per hour; but whereas aircraft can stay on task for a few hours only, ships and submarines can stay at sea for weeks.
8 It was forty years since there had been a major war at sea. How would the complex array of weapon systems, counter-measures and counter-counter-measures work when the shooting started? There would be surprises. The fog of war might well obscure valuable lessons to be learned from the first engagements with the enemy. The Operations Analysis teams would have to be given every opportunity to find out exactly what had happened. There would probably be heavy casualties on both sides. It would be just as important to know why we were successful as why we had failed.
It had been the usual practice, in drawing up NATO plans, to consider first ‘the threat’. JACWA decided, instead, to begin by looking in some detail at what the Command would have to do, first of all during any period of warning that NATO might have of an impending Soviet or Warsaw Pact attack, then during the first two or three days of hostilities. As far as the opening phase of a war was concerned, they considered how SACLANT and JACWA could achieve sufficient ascendancy over the Soviet Navy, in the Atlantic and elsewhere, to ensure the safe and timely arrival in Europe of the seaborne military supplies and reinforcements essential to sustain SACEUR.