The Third World War: The Untold Story

On the morning of 4 August 1985, there were many in European cities who had heard (with quite a few old enough to remember) how it had been when people were told in September 1939 in much the same way, if without TV, that we had again a world war on our hands. People in the United Kingdom, for example, had then slung on their mandatory gas masks and taken up their tin hats, if their duties required it, in the full belief that the end was very near. In 1985 those with access to a fall-out shelter tended to make for it, or at least to see that it was in order and well stocked, while those without wondered rather glumly whether it had been wholly wise to disregard advice about survival under nuclear attack. In the cities of Europe in both wars the worst was expected at once. In neither did it happen — not immediately anyway.

Some of the towns and cities in Western Europe had not long to wait for the thunderous, irregular, ear-splitting crash of Soviet bombardment from the air, and the agonizing uncertainty over who was still alive at home, or even where home was in the street now turned to rubble. The places first attacked were those of importance in the movement of NATO troop reinforcements to the European mainland. Channel ports in Britain, and in Belgium and the Netherlands, though not yet in France, received early and violent attention on the very first day from long-range missiles launched from Soviet aircraft. Coastal airfields, especially those handling military transports, and the air traffic control centre at West Drayton near London were among early targets struck. The United Kingdom Air Defence (UKAD) Command, with its complex of warning systems, interceptor aircraft squadrons and gun and missile defences, was fully extended practically from the start. It was almost overwhelmed at first by the volume of attack upon defences that had never yet been brought to the test in this new type of war, in which computer response and missiles had replaced the searchlight and visually-aimed guns of earlier days.

Operations in the north, up as far as the Arctic Circle, opened at once on account of their relevance to trans-Atlantic reinforcement. Attacks on Atlantic ports soon followed, swift moments of appalling noise, leaving, in a silence broken only by the crackling sound of gathering fire, the twisted steel of harbour installations with little houses near the docks reduced to burning shells. As the Soviets gained airfields to the west, it was felt upon the French side too, with Brest and the Channel ports joining Glasgow, Bantry, Bristol and Cardiff on the list of towns hit.

It had taken the Soviets almost a full day to realize that, against their hopes and expectations, they had a belligerent opponent in the French Republic. Moscow had firmly believed that the French, pursuing as always the national self-interest with a single-mindedness unequalled anywhere, would find it more prudent to keep out. Yet for all the obstacles set in the way of Western defensive co-operation by de Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO, and for all the reliance the Soviet Union had placed upon some years of left-wing government in France, the French Republic abided most faithfully by its obligations under the Atlantic Treaty.

In spite of assurances broadcast worldwide from Moscow that France would remain immune from attack if it remained neutral, and that the punitive and prophylactic operation undertaken by the USSR against NATO would in that event go no further than the Rhine, II French Corps in Germany had already been quietly placed by the French Government under the full command of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) on the night of 3/4 August. Three further divisions and an army headquarters soon followed, with the French Tactical Air Force also placed under command for the support of French ground forces. French ports, railways, military installations and, above all, airfields and airspace were put at the disposal of the Western allies. The bombing by Soviet aircraft of Boulogne, Calais, Dieppe and then Brest, and of other ports and a number of airfields followed very soon afterwards.