“That man’s a lickspittle liar!” burst out Nekrassov. “They’ve no bread, they can’t feed the troops, so with the help of the medics they dream up bogus scientific theories.” Then he stopped himself.”
The Warsaw Pact offensive opened with considerable advantage to the attack. The ratio of forces gave them a general superiority over their opponents of rather better than three to one in ground troops, with an even more marked numerical advantage in tanks and tube artillery, though with no great advantage in quality. Indeed the latest generation of NATO tanks, the US M-1
In their tactical air forces, as in target acquisition and battlefield control techniques, the Western allies had had to accept disappointment in the pre-war years, when budgetary restrictions deprived them of much needed innovations. They had largely had to make do with what there was, but with a deliberate attempt to do so more effectively, exploiting to the full such improvements as tight budgets permitted.
The Warsaw Pact side also enjoyed the advantage on 4 August 1985 of having had, roughly speaking, about two weeks’ more time in which to mobilize than NATO.
A further advantage to the offensive lay in the initiative over nuclear and chemical weapons. It was clear that biological weapons would not be used, but operations on the Western side had to be conducted in initial uncertainty over the other two. This meant accepting the penalty of operating under nuclear and chemical precautions with a degradation of efficiency which in some situations could be something like 50 per cent.
The greatest advantage of all to the offensive, however, lay in the choice of time and place for attack, which put in the attackers’ hands the power to concentrate a high superiority of force almost where they wished.
In fact, topography exercised so compulsive an influence on choice of thrust line that Soviet hands were not as free as in theory they should have been, while Allied formations were fighting on ground they now knew very well indeed, which the enemy did not. None the less the speedy identification of main thrusts, so that defences and counter-offensive means could be moved to meet mounting threats in good time, formed one of the main preoccupations of Allied corps and divisional commanders.
A message that came out from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to the world at large on 4 August 1985 read as follows:
‘Warsaw Pact attacks Allied Command Europe. First light undercover and parachute operations followed by massive armoured assault along entire front. Heavy fighting in Central Region. Allies under severe pressure. Soviets claim action “purely defensive”. Situation confused. MFL.’
There was, indeed, scarcely any part of the forward positions of NATO in the Central Region which in the early hours of that August day of 1985 did not come under violent air and artillery attack, with chemical weapons freely in use.
The position in NATO over chemical warfare (CW) was far from satisfactory. Up to the very moment of the outbreak European allies had not been able to reach general agreement on the acceptance of chemical munitions to be located in their own countries in peacetime. The US, as we have seen earlier in Chapter 5 on weapons, had been manufacturing binary rounds since the early 1980s and under bilateral agreements with the UK and the FRG producing stocks also for them, to be held on their account in the United States until needed. The UK took in some of the stock held on their behalf in air shipments from the United States starting on 1 August and were ready to retaliate on 6 August. The FRG followed suit two days later. Typically, there was on 4 August still no decision in the NATO Council. The Supreme Allied Commander, as Commander-in-Chief of all US troops in Europe, would not wait. In that capacity, with the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, he ordered immediate retaliation by US troops on 4 August. The I British Corps opened retaliatory action on 6 August, the three German corps on 8 August.