The Third World War: The Untold Story

As the pattern of the day’s events grew clearer on 5 August, the Soviet High Command could view the outcome of the first day’s operations with some satisfaction, even if all its hopes had not been wholly fulfilled. There had been no complete breakthrough on any of the four major thrust lines. There was no sign yet of any opening which could be exploited by the huge mass of armour in the two groups of tank armies in Belorussia and the Ukraine, which were being held there principally for this purpose. But gains had been made, particularly in the north, where Hamburg had been isolated (and, like Berlin, bypassed) and left uncertain of its fate, while the seizure of Bremen had opened, as had been intended, good possibilities of exploitation towards the Low Countries. Most of Nieder-Sachsen was already in Soviet hands.

Morale in NATO formations, though patchy and showing signs of cracking here and there under the first furious waves of assault, with its head-splitting clamour and the thunderous menace from which there was no hiding place, had not collapsed. It seemed, indeed, by nightfall to have improved somewhat. Progress in the assault against the Americans, where easy gains had been expected, had been disappointing. The forward anti-tank guided missile defences were well sited and skilfully controlled and anti-tank helicopters acting with A-10 Thunderbolt tank destroyers had inflicted many armoured casualties. A weakness on the Western side, which was of advantage to the Soviets and which had been foreseen by them, was some uncertainty as to who actually owned rotary-wing aircraft, with division of opinion between ground and air commanders, as to how best to use them. Where there was a close relationship between rotary and fixed-wing anti-tank tactics, as in the action against 8 Guards Army of US formations in the Fulda area, the result had been distinctly unfavourable to attacking armour.

The movement of refugees out of the frontier areas, where the population had largely stayed in place as a result of political assurances based on forward defence, was seen as particularly favourable to the attack. Soviet air and artillery had aimed at driving refugee movement on to roads in use for rearward movement by the Western allies, and then off the main thrust lines intended for use in the Soviet advance. Orders not only to disregard civilian casualties but to maximize them to this end had been correctly carried out.

There was no doubt, however, that the first day, whatever its gains, had not shown the rate of advance expected by the Soviet High Command. This had to improve if the plan were to be completely successful.

At the outbreak of hostilities the British Prime Minister had instructed that the press be kept as fully informed as possible. There would, it was hoped, be no misunderstanding of the kind that had plagued the coverage by the American media of the Vietnam tragedy. Consequently, Squadron Leader Guy Whitworth, Weapons Leader of 617 Squadron of the RAF, stationed at Marham in the United Kingdom, was not surprised to receive a sympathetic but firm invitation from his Station Commander to ‘Come down and tell some defence correspondents about your Magdeburg trip’.

It was 0630 hours on 7 August. Guy Whitworth was in the Ops block at RAF Marham, just finishing his debrief to the Wing Intelligence staff. He had landed two hours previously after a three-hour trip in a Tornado which had taken him from the relative peace of Norfolk across Belgium and West Germany beyond the Elbe to an airfield just a few miles east of Magdeburg and through a trough of action he had yet to sort out for himself. This is his description of the flight which had taken eight GR-1 Tornados from Marham in an attack upon a major airfield 100 miles beyond the battle. We reprint it here as it came out in the Christian Science Monitor in June 1986.

“We were briefed that this particular airfield housed a regiment of MiG-27 Flogger Js. These are the best of the current Soviet short-range offensive support aircraft and we have been told that they make their presence felt in the ground battle. It seems that they can operate from hard-packed earth runways, but that they have not yet begun to do so, perhaps because they can maintain a higher sortie rate by staying close to their weapon and fuel support at their main operating base. Flogger has a very limited night or all-weather capability and we reckoned we had a good chance of catching most of them on the deck in the early hours of the morning.