The Third World War: The Untold Story

For some years the Soviet Navy had been using Conakry in Guinea, West Africa, as a turn-round base for their long-range Bear maritime reconnaissance aircraft and, occasionally also, Backfire bombers and supporting air tankers. In this way their aircraft could sweep down the length of the North Atlantic one day and up again the next. All of this was well observed by the US and British surveillance systems and it was naive if the Soviet Navy expected aircraft at Conakry to be unmolested in war. Nevertheless, on the evening of 4 August 1985 there were four Bears, two Backfires and a tanker on the airfield and the USAF responded promptly.

At midnight a mission of four B-52D bombers from the California Wing at March Air Force base took off from their war deployment base in Florida for a direct attack with 120 tons of high-explosive bombs under the command of Major Ed Lodge in the lead aircraft. They started their bomb runs to the target nine hours later from a clear blue sky. There was no fighter opposition and the Soviet SAM, which only started coming up as the bombing neared its end, were easily confused by the B-52s’ ECM. Runways, control facilities, hangars and fuel installations were taken as precision targets and systematically destroyed as the B-52s ploughed their furrows 10,000 metres up in the sky. Their success was total and the airfield was put out of use to such a degree that the Soviet Navy made no attempt to use it again.

Some of the wiser leaders in Africa saw the moral. Client states or surrogates would do well to ensure that their patron countries had the power and the reach to protect them from the dangers to which politics and geography might expose them. Guinea had painfully failed to foresee these risks.

Back at their base in Florida, as the citations for medals for the bomber crews were read out, the media were electrified to discover that the mission commander’s full name was Edwina Tinkle Lodge. She was among the first of a small group of young women who graduated from the US Air Force Academy and was accepted for training in the Military Airlift Command in the 1970s, where she had excelled as a pilot and aircraft captain. With a little help from her congressman, who was out for the women’s vote, she had been transferred to the B-52 Bomber Wing at March Air Force base which trained for a wide range of conventional bombing tasks. The Conakry raid was just one of them.

The example of the USAF was not generally followed in other Allied air forces even though there was an all-round shortage of experienced pilots stemming from the lean recruiting years of the 1970s. The critical difficulty lay in the restrictions placed on flying hours by governments for economic reasons. In due course corrective action had to be taken and in the RAF, for example, measures to keep experienced pilots longer on front-line duties helped to offset the dilution of experience which was exacerbated in the early 1980s by the need to cream off the best of the ‘fast jet-set’ to man the Tornado as it came into service. An important step in tackling that problem was when the British Government and its Treasury advisers were at last shaken out of the wrong-headed notion that there was an easy money-saving Midas touch in cutting back on flying and training. But it took a costly accident rate to persuade them of the folly of keeping an air force out of the air. A sustained drive was mounted to improve reliability of all equipment and to streamline the flow of logistics to the flight lines in the forward areas — wherever the fortunes of war might decide that they would be. This campaign paid off handsomely when the war came. Spinney’s report turned out to have had a very long tail.

What was done in the RAF was characteristic of the sort of effort and improvement programmes mounted by all the Allied air forces. The benefit of such measures came through steadily to the front line and evidence of this showed up in the rigorous evaluations under simulated war conditions imposed by independent multi-national NATO inspection teams. But certain innovations in the use of civil resources in Britain were of a rather special nature and deserve mention because they played a positive part in preserving and exploiting the strategic importance of the UK base within the Alliance.