The Third World War: August 1985

The telephone rang.

He answered it and heard the familiar voice of the British Liaison Officer at I German Corps.

It was urgent and agitated.

‘Parachutists!’ it said, ‘Russian parachutists on…’

The voice abruptly died.

Several direct-line telephones were jangling in the Ops room at once. He heard shouts in the building. There were shots outside, the noise of helicopter rotors, a violent explosion.

He threw the switch of the alarm system and unhooked the direct line to AFCENT and in that moment looked up.

A Russian soldier was standing in the doorway.

The Duty Officer was getting to his feet and reaching for the pistol lying by the gas respirator on the table before him when the Russian shot him dead.[3]

CHAPTER 12: NATO Forces

The structure and strength of the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as they stood against those of the Warsaw Pact in the summer of 1985, must now be examined.

Attempts on the part of the Atlantic Council to prescribe to Allied governments, in the early days of the Alliance, what force goals they should meet had long been abandoned. Member states had always, in fact, put up no more than what they thought they could afford, usually claiming in self-justification that nothing more was necessary.

In actual structure NATO was still in 1985 much as it had been for the past twenty years. Except for some adjustment in the matter of naval and tactical air command (to which detailed reference is made in Appendix 3) there had been little change.

At the head of the Alliance of the fifteen signatory states stood the North Atlantic Council, meeting at ministerial level in normal times at least twice a year but with permanent representatives at ambassador level meeting constantly. The senior military authority in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the peacetime military structure which was such an important and unusual feature of the Alliance, was the Military Committee, composed of an independent chairman and a Chief of Staff of each Allied country except France, which had withdrawn from it in 1966, Iceland, which had no forces, and Luxembourg, which was represented by Belgium. The Military Committee was in permanent session with its own military staff. There were two Supreme Allied Commanders, SACEUR for Europe and SACLANT for the Atlantic, both American, and the Cs-in-C of the Joint Allied Command Western Approaches (JACWA) who were British. Under SACEUR were three regional commands: the northern, AFNORTH, with a British Commander-in-Chief; the central, AFCENT, under a French C-in-C until France’s withdrawal from the integrated military organization in 1966 and thereafter under a German; and the southern, AFSOUTH, under an American admiral.

In peacetime there were under AFNORTH, which took in Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark and Norway, the assigned forces of Norway and Denmark and one German division. There were plans for reinforcements from the UK, Canada and elsewhere, if they could be got there in time, in an emergency.

Under AFCENT were the Northern and Central Army Groups, NORTHAG and CENTAG, the first under a British, the second under an American, commander. Also under AFCENT was AIR-CENT, which provided centralized control of the two Allied air forces supporting NORTHAG and CENTAG.

Under AFSOUTH, commanded by a US admiral, came the assigned Italian and Turkish forces (and, as long as she remained a member, the forces of Greece) with the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean also earmarked, though not assigned. There was an overall air command (AIRSOUTH) but two subordinate naval commands and separate commands for ground defence in Italy, under an Italian general, and, in the south-eastern part of the area, including Turkey, under an American.

In spite of the great importance of the flanks the critical area of NATO on land was clearly the Central Region, covering the Federal Republic of Germany up to (but excluding) Schleswig-Holstein and the Federal frontier with the Low Countries. It was in the Central Region that NATO’s greatest concentration of ground and tactical air forces was gathered, facing those of the Warsaw Pact across the Demarcation Line which separated West and East Germany, then followed the Czechoslovak frontier down to neutral Austria on the south-eastern flank.