The Third World War: The Untold Story

Moreover, General Pankratov was again finding himself travelling round the old vicious circle. He could not call for air support unless the progress his attack had made had earned him preferential treatment over other divisions in the army. As he had already discovered, it was sometimes impossible to make the progress required to qualify for air support unless you had it in the first instance. The inflexibility of battle procedures was a good match for the tight restrictions placed upon a commander’s action by the Party. The two together made an almost certain formula for disaster, which was only kept at arm’s length by the enormous weight of forces the Red Army had available and the staggering degree to which the common soldier accepted casualties.

General Pankratov looked up from the tank, vehicle and ammunition states which had just been given to him — none of which made any more cheerful reading than the personnel strength and artillery states he had already seen — and in a tired and indifferent voice gave the orders for tomorrow’s battle.

He would go into action in his command vehicle, wearing a peaked military cap, as always. Steel helmets were hard on the head and difficult to manoeuvre in and out of hatches. If his BTR 50-PU were hit by anything that mattered, a steel helmet would be of no help anyway. General Pankratov, like most generals anywhere, was something of a fatalist.”[5]

The performance of Warsaw Pact formations had not in some important respects proved entirely satisfactory to the Soviet High Command. Co-operation between arms had been incomplete. Artillery support had been slow in response and inflexible. Junior command had been lacking in thrust, relying too much on guidance from above. The Western allies had been quick to exploit this weakness, applying their excellent electronic capabilities to the identification of command elements which they then often managed to take out. Coherence in units, in spite of the close attention of KGB barrage battalions, had not been high, often because of the low level of reservist weapon skill and the great difficulty in achieving co-operation between men who could not understand each other’s languages. Finally, there was the greater difficulty of co-ordinating infantry and tanks in action. Only infantry, in the long run, could effectively put down anti-tank defences, however powerful the assistance of technical aids to suppressive action by artillery and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. The tanks were highly vulnerable to unsuppressed and well-sited ATGW, as well as to long-range fire from very capably handled Allied tanks. Without infantry the tanks of the Warsaw Pact were at a severe disadvantage. But the BMP was even more vulnerable than the tank, as well as being unable to move over the country at the same speed. It very quickly became Allied practice to try to separate infantry from tanks and this was often highly successful.

There was enormous weight in the resources still available to the Soviet High Command. There were on 14 August forty Warsaw Pact divisions in the Central Region, of which fifteen were tank divisions, and no more than half of them had been in action. Their total fire power was three or four times as great as the sum of what faced them. Time, however, was not on their side. The reasons for an expeditious consolidation of the stop-line on the River Rhine had lost none of their urgency. Failure to keep up with the timetable could have unwelcome consequences.

“Wing Commander Roger Pullin, Commanding Officer of 19 Squadron, could hardly believe his senses. It was 0430 hours on 15 August, he was very tired, he was down to his last five Phantoms, the main runway had been repaired twice, his crews — or what remained of them — were on their last legs from battle strain and sheer fatigue and now, standing on the other side of the plotting table in the hardened Squadron Ops block, between two rather self-important engine mechanics turned Squadron guards, was a real live Soviet pilot, still in his equivalent of a Mae West, “G” suit, leg restrainers, and all the rest. He was obviously a very angry pilot.

The lads explained that he had literally dropped into the middle of the Squadron dispersal area, unclipped his parachute, thrown his revolver at their feet and, muttering under his breath, marched willingly with them into the Squadron block.