The Third World War: The Untold Story

If the Soviet High Command had put in 3 Shock Army immediately behind 1 Guards Tank Army the threat to CENTAG would have been far more serious. The Soviets, however, had committed 3 Shock Army in the north, to exploit the favourable position developing there for the execution of the truly critical part of the main plan, the breakthrough to swing southwards along the Rhine on the left bank.

NORTHAG, with two British, one German and the remains of one Dutch corps under command, was now fighting grimly on a line running westwards from near Minden to Nijmegen in the Netherlands, facing north, with an ominous bulge in the south near Venlo, later to be generally known as the Krefeld salient. The I British Corps on the right had done well to stay in being, largely due here also to the successful use of anti-tank guided weapons, particularly those deployed in small stay-behind parties, operating with German Jagd-Kommandos in country which the British knew very well and which to the Germans was native soil. The tactics of the ‘sponge’, for the absorption of the flow of armour, had been paying off, but the situation could not stay the way it was much longer. In the west I German Corps was under heavy pressure along the Teutoburger Wald, the Soviet intention clearly being to drive it in very soon. Further west II British Corps with a US brigade and some Dutch troops under command was being hard pressed south of Wesel, defending the Venlo gap between the Rivers Rhine and Maas in the very tip of the salient.

“The order to advance against II German Corps in SOUTHAG at 0400 hours on the morning of 7 August had been received on the previous afternoon by Major General Pankratov, commanding 51 Tank Division of 8 Guards Army on the Central Front. It found the division theoretically (though not in fact) at full strength, its personnel at an assumed total of 10,843, its armoured fighting vehicle strength at 418 T-72 tanks and 241 BMP 2s. Its artillery included 126 SP howitzers, forty-eight multiple rocket launchers (twenty-four Grad-P, twenty-four BM-27) and sixty-two heavy SP anti-aircraft equipments in combined rocket and automatic artillery units. The division was organized normally. It was a Category One formation, as was usual for those deployed in Eastern Europe, with its equipment complete and personnel at between 75 and 100 per cent, filled out to full strength in an emergency such as this. It had one motor rifle and three tank regiments, a regiment of 152 mm SP guns and one of anti-aircraft missiles, together with eight other separate battalions. These comprised a FROG 7 rocket unit, communications, reconnaissance, engineer, transport, chemical defence and repair battalions and another embodying medical services. Manpower, from many parts of the USSR, was by now some 10 per cent deficient.

The day before the advance three further battalions were added to the divisional strength, in theory under Major General Pankratov’s command, in fact under the exclusive control of one Lieutenant Colonel Drobis of the KGB, the head of what was known at divisional headquarters as the Special Section. Two of these units were so-called KGB barrage battalions, manned by personnel of mixed origin with a relatively low degree of military training. There were cheerful, healthy looking young Komsomol workers alongside guards drafted from prisons and members of respectable bureaucratic families who had hitherto done little or no military service but whose engagement to the Party interest could be counted on as total.

The barrage battalions were equipped with light trucks and armed with machine-guns and portable anti-tank weapons. The function of these units was simple and their location in the forward deployment plan of the division in the attack followed logically from it. They were placed well up behind the leading elements to ensure, by the use of their weapons from the rear, that the forward impetus of their own troops was maintained and there was no hesitancy or slowing down, still less any tendency to withdraw. KGB fire power was an important element in the maintenance of momentum. This caused losses, of course, but these would be readily compensated for in the arrival of fresh follow-up formations, so that the net gain could always be reckoned worthwhile. The use of KGB barrage battalions to stimulate offensive forward movement was, moreover, an essential element accepted without question in the Red Army’s system of tactical practice in the field. This was wholly oriented to the offensive. Defence played virtually no part in it at all and offensive impetus had to be maintained.