The Third World War: The Untold Story

Each of their armies had been organized, equipped, trained and oriented in the basically offensive mode of the Soviet armed forces and integrated into them as closely as differing circumstances allowed. The impatience of certain older and more doctrinaire officers of the Soviet High Command at the apparent unattainability of total integration was understood in the Defence Committee of the Politburo, its most important element, but had to be restrained. The armed forces of these three countries remained, as events proved, very different, each retaining marked characteristics derived from different parentage and upbringing.

The army of the GDR (the National People’s Army or NPA) emerged as a totally new creation in the 1960s. It was always the smallest of the three, at little more than 120,000 strong at the outbreak of war, of which half were eighteen-month conscripts. It had no military tradition of its own (the re-emergence in the 1970s of historic distinctions between Saxon and Prussian units was of no great significance) and was entirely subservient to a Party regime whose interests were closely consonant with those of the Soviet Union. Fear of a threat from West Germany, carefully cultivated by the USSR, was helpful during the formative period, but Ostpolitik and detente reduced the value of this threat as a bonding material, and defection from the NPA to the West in the 1970s was considerable. This was rarely found, it must be said, among officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, which was evidence of the degree of reward and encouragement offered to the military by the Party. While the two tank and four motor-rifle divisions of the NPA were to be assigned a fully forward role in the offensive of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) in August 1985, the reliability of the NPA (not so much in the officer cadre, particularly at higher levels, as in the rank and file) was always to the Soviet High Command a cause for uneasiness. When the lightning successes of Warsaw Pact forces over NATO, upon which the loyalty of the East German NPA within the Pact depended, even more than it did with others, failed to materialize and there was civil commotion, starting with sabotage and violence first of all in Dresden on 11 August, it was not thought prudent to use the NPA, at least in the first instance, to suppress it. The Bereitschaftspolizei of the Ministry of the Interior were called in first and then, when the rioting spread on 14 August to Leipzig, a Wach-regiment under the orders of the Ministry of State Security moved in. When disorder spread further, Soviet permission was, with the utmost reluctance, sought by the GDR to withdraw NPA regular troops to suppress it, and permission was as reluctantly given. The three NPA motor rifle regiments brought back for the purpose on 17/18 August proved unmanageable. Orders were disobeyed, desertion was rife, officers were shot. The Party was still supreme in the GDR but from now on it was progressively less able to govern.

How different was the case of Poland. The Polish armed forces, having refused in 1970 to intervene against the near-rebellious civil population, felt obliged to take complete control of the country in 1981. It is still not clear whether General Jaruzelski imposed martial law because in his view as a Polish patriot it was the only alternative to an outright imposition of Soviet administration, or because, as a communist, he genuinely believed that Solidarity’s power was incompatible with the orderly government of the state. Whatever the answer to this riddle, the assumption of power had two effects on the Polish Army. Its manpower was deeply committed to the maintenance of internal security, and so could make less contribution to an external military operation. On the other hand, fighting West Germans might be more attractive to many Polish soldiers than repressing Solidarity. In fact they were soon to have the worst of both worlds, when it became clear that one of the Polish Army’s main roles in the war would be to prevent Polish partisans from cutting the Soviet supply lines across Polish territory into Federal Germany.

The threat to Polish national independence posed by the FRG, heavily emphasized by the Soviets, had become increasingly less credible during the 1970s. There was little else to bind Polish military interests to the USSR in its obsession with a blind hostility to NATO. The unwillingness of the Soviet military to treat their Polish colleagues as professionals of the same standing (which, at equivalent levels, they undoubtedly were) and the reluctance of Moscow to furnish the Polish Army with modern equipment did little to bridge the inevitable gap between nations that had been more often enemies than friends. On the Soviet side, moreover, the tendency of the Polish military to allow professionalism to take precedence over ideology was in the late seventies arousing increasing uneasiness.