The Third World War: August 1985

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.