The Third World War: The Untold Story

In this connection it is worth recalling that in 1979 the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) first publicly announced the intention to designate eighty B-52Ds in support of NATO forces. The bomb bay of the B-52Ds had been enlarged in 1967 to carry up to 70,000 lb of conventional free-fall bombs and in 1977 the aircraft were given further structural and avionic improvements to extend their operational life and to enhance their conventional bombing capability. In September 1978, B-52s from 7 Bomber Wing at Cars-well, Texas, participated for the first time in the NATO exercise ‘Cold Fire’. Thereafter, they trained more and more frequently in European conditions.

On some occasions in their training they flew directly across the Atlantic, simulated attacks on ‘hostile’ forces in Western Europe and returned to their bases in Texas and California with the assistance of air-to-air refuelling. By 1981, regular deployments were being made to forward operating bases such as Brize Norton or Marham in England. Tactical response was thus being quickened without the political implications of permanent basing. But this exacerbated the nagging problem that air bases in the United Kingdom were becoming heavily overcrowded, and therefore increasingly attractive as targets to an enemy. While regular SAC deployments to Lajes in the Azores, which began in 1983, eased the overcrowding to some extent, the problem remained.

Although there had been hundreds of airfields in Britain by the end of the Second World War, by 1982 there were less than fifty in the hands of the RAF and the USAF — the latter having long maintained both strategic and tactical wings in the UK. Recovering the old wartime airfields was out of the question and for some years the RAF had been eyeing the civil airports with their modern runways and ground facilities. But nothwithstanding goodwill from national and municipal authorities, commercial, constitutional and communications problems had always stood in the way of their military use. By 1984, however, twenty-three airports had been earmarked and were exercised as satellites of main RAF and USAF bases. The rationalization of military and civil communications had been the main hurdle to clear; once that was done, and with a wider public appreciation of the threat to the country, the other difficulties fell away. The plan was to use these civil airports as dispersed sites for flights of up to eight aircraft and thereby distribute the precious air eggs in that many more ground baskets.

The difficulty lay in knowing how to sustain operations without technical facilities and logistic stocks. To ease the problem the airmen’s eyes had been resting on the civilian helicopter fleet which had grown to more than a hundred aircraft around the North Sea oil industry. The operating companies were very willing to play their part in national plans and readily agreed to a scheme, in emergency, of attaching up to four of their aircraft to each of the main RAF and USAF bases so as to form a logistic chain to the newly earmarked satellite airfields. The plan was exercised a few times before the war and when the real need came the civilian helicopter crews performed herculean tasks in ferrying technicians, weapon reloads, test equipment and spare parts. They did this by day and by night without regard to weather, often plying between airfields under missile attack. Hardened air crew that they were, some were heard to comment, with a nice taste for understatement, that it was quite relaxing after the rigours of flying to the North Sea rigs in winter.

A signal success came to these helicopters in the first days just before and after the outbreak of war as the ‘air bridge’ was swung across the Atlantic and US Boeing 747s and Lockheed C-5s were landing up to 300 troops in central England every four minutes. The commercial helicopters ferried thousands of troops and hundreds of tons of their supplies from the airfields to the railheads and east coast ports. This eased what threatened to become an unmanageable congestion on the roads and railways and cut vital hours off the reinforcement time from the United States to the continent of Europe.

None the less, what the Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe (COMAAFCE) had described in 1982 as ‘the Achilles heel’ of his Command, the insufficient availability of stocks of fuel, ordnance, spares and other requirements on dispersal airfields, continued to give concern. Co-located operational bases (COB), from which both USAF and RAF aircraft could operate, alleviated the difficulty. It was never quite to disappear. The danger that reinforcement aircraft, together with those withdrawn from further forward, would arrive in such numbers as to swamp support facilities remained.