The Third World War: The Untold Story

By 2359 hours on 3 August, the Sentries had watched five regiments of Hind E gunships deploy, as part of the ‘exercise’, to forward bases 30 miles from the IGB. Two regiments of SU-25 Flatfoot ground-attack aircraft had returned to their major bases north of Leipzig, which placed them in range of both the area around Fulda and the north German plain. More significantly, the intensity of the jamming now rapidly increased. Only spasmodic attempts had ever been made to jam the Sentries’ surveillance radar before. Triangulation from the three Sentries constantly on station quickly pinpointed the sources of the jamming as eight AN-12 Cubs operating in their ECM mode, cruising some 100 kilometres beyond the IGB. However, because of the narrow beam width of the Westinghouse AN/APY-1 radar installed in the E-3A Sentries and its low side-lobe characteristics, the effect on the AWACS’ radar screens was negligible and their effectiveness remained high.

The Sentries were not the only targets for the jammers: below and in front of them were the inviting targets of the NATO ground radars — static, still in process of modernization, and highly vulnerable both to direct jamming and to side-lobe penetration. One after another these reported to their sector commanders that their medium- and high-level surveillance was becoming impaired, despite rapid switching through the frequencies available to them. The effectiveness of Soviet Click jammers, long suspected, was now being confirmed.

It was at 0315 hours on 4 August, 25,000 feet over Ramstein in the Federal Republic, that the radar operators of the Sentry aircraft E-3A 504826 of 965 Squadron, detached from Tinker to USAFE (United States Air Force Europe), first saw twelve blips appear on their screens, crossing eastern Poland at 35,000 feet, apparently from the central Ukraine on a westerly heading, at a speed of just under Mach 2. Within seconds they were also spotted by the Sentries over Venlo and west of Munich and identified as Backfires. All data were flashed immediately down to COMAAFCE’s battle staff. The Ramstein, Wildenrath (RAF) and Neuburg (FRG) battle flights were immediately scrambled and climbed away to their intercept positions, still well west of the IGB. The Backfires crossed the Polish frontier into the GDR but then broke formation and in six pairs fanned out on headings in an arc towards Hamburg in the north and Bavaria in the south. All twelve were maintaining radio silence.

Then, while still 50 miles inside Warsaw Pact territory, they banked steeply and within a few seconds one after another inexplicably turned back towards Poland. The senior controller in 504826 began to express his surprise, speaking in a somewhat relaxed tone on his secure encoded downlink to his colleagues in the bunker 30,000 feet below. As they listened his voice suddenly stopped, and at the same moment the steady, friendly IFF (identification friend or foe) signal from 504826 which was being received by the two other Sentries abruptly disappeared. As subsequent events showed, even if the USAF crew had heard the warning shouted by the Dutch ECM operator in the Venlo Sentry there was little they could have done.

It should be recalled that one important modification to the original E-3A Sentry had been the fitting of hard points under the wings and fuselage which could carry chaff dispensers and air-to-air defensive weapons. Chaff comprised strips of metal foil exactly cut to simulate and amplify a given wavelength. A cloud of these would give the same response as an emitter on the same wavelength, and thus act as a decoy to attract a homing missile. At the same time as the electronic support measure (ESM) refit in 1983, and in a rare example of refusal to spoil a ship for a ha’p’orth of tar, NATO had also funded provision of these chaff dispensers. The USAF had taken a little longer to be convinced that the E-3A might not always see its attacker and be able to avoid him. Consequently, not all their AWACS carried this kind of protection. It was the misfortune of the crew from 965 Squadron that their aircraft that night had not yet been modified.