The Third World War: August 1985

French ports, communication complexes and military installations had suffered considerably from it, though not to the same extent as targets in the UK, which were more important to the US war effort and more readily accessible. There had been no bombing of French cities and it seemed probable, for the present at least, that France would not use her strategic nuclear capability unless there were. But the United Kingdom, in spite of the best efforts of its air defences, was taking a pounding as the battle in the Central Region approached a climax.

It was perfectly clear to SACEUR that if there was any possibility at all that the military position could be held back from total disaster without nuclear weapons it was his plain and compelling duty not to press the President for their use. He was also aware that if he did press for nuclear release his request would almost certainly be granted.

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.