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,[3] 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.
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 democratic 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.
3
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.