The Third World War: August 1985

It was planned that from 1985 onwards II British Corps, with its headquarters normally located in Britain and with a wartime location near Rheine on the Dortmund-Ems Canal, would carry out manoeuvres in BAOR once a year. The extra divisions would at last give the Commander of NORTHAG what had been lacking for so long — some degree of depth. He would now have in consequence a better chance of containing an incursion without very early recourse to nuclear weapons.

During this time of awakening interest in defence, perhaps no question in any Allied country (except possibly the truly critical problem of reserves in the United States, to which we shall return) raised more domestic difficulties than that of the air defence of the United Kingdom. The nakedness of NATO, once the nuclear shield was seen to be so brittle, was nowhere more brutally exposed than in the vulnerability of the British Isles to air attack. The comforting assumption of the short, sharp war conducted in someone else’s country had vanished once it had been realized that in the present condition of NATO a war with the Warsaw Pact was most likely to be short and sharp if it were to end in victory for the other side. To prevent this would need a capacity for sustained intensive conventional operations, and in these the position of the United Kingdom as a rearward base for Europe and a forward base for the United States made heavy air attack inevitable.

Rueful looks were now cast back at the baleful consequences of the 1957 White Paper, of which one had been the concentration, in the interests of economy and ease of management without operational penalty, of RAF installations in vulnerable patterns offering responsive and rewarding targets to penetrating aircraft. The recovery and rehabilitation of airfields disposed of to the army or to civilian use, the construction of further airfields to relieve dangerous congestion on those used by the USAF (which already in 1977 had more than 200 F-111s in Britain), the hardening of operational control centres and the provision of mobile alternatives were all only parts of a very big construction programme demanding the expenditure of something like £1,000 million in a three-year plan.

It had soon become apparent that the permanent stationing of further USAF squadrons in the UK, probably on the west coast, would now be unavoidable. This brought at least partly into public view a matter which had long been under confidential discussion: the question of the distribution of responsibilities between British and American air forces in an emergency.

There had long been little doubt that the USAF would generally play the dominant part in air operations based in the UK. There was equally little doubt that, although the USAF would assume the chief responsibility for the security and air defence of its own installations in the UK and a high degree of responsibility for the defence of the UK base as a whole, the RAF would have to play the chief part in the defence of national territory. It was, indeed, a sign of the reviving national self-respect evident in Britain at the end of the seventies that in the matter of air defence, as well as in other respects, total reliance on the United States was being increasingly replaced by a robust determination in the British people to play a full part in their own defence — and to pay for it.

A growing public willingness in Britain from the end of the seventies to see a higher proportion of a rising GNP devoted to defence can be said to have been truly indispensable to the survival of the Western Alliance in the years that were to follow. There was a limit to the share of other people’s burdens which would be borne by the United States. There was also no lack of latent-support on the western side of the Atlantic for the dangerous argument that the US should disengage itself from the Alliance.