The Third World War: The Untold Story

Roger buzzed the Station Commander, notified the Ground Defence Wing Commander and then turned to the angry man before him. On the evening of 3 August, less than a fortnight but what seemed more than a century ago, Roger had stopped by the Officers’ Mess to pick up a bottle of Scotch. There had been much to think about since then and it was still in his brief case. He now took it out and in excellent Russian asked his visitor if he would like a cup of coffee or maybe something stronger. The pilot was taken aback by the offer, as well as by the fact that it was made in his own language. The Wing Commander was a Cambridge modern language graduate, who had done a tour as Assistant Air Attaché in Moscow in the late 1970s, but his visitor could not possibly have known that. Five minutes later they were sitting in Roger’s office, the door open and an armed guard a couple of yards away in the corridor.

Roger had had quick instructions from the Station Commander.

“Your man will be going off up the line as soon as they come to take him away, for specialist interrogation. What I want you to do is to get from him his own story of what happened to him and put it on a tape for me the way it might have come from one of our own boys, so that I can really get the hang of it. I gather he’s a bit het up and should talk freely. You’ve got about ten minutes.”

The visiting pilot’s name was Captain Leonid Balashov, and he had just been shot down by one of his own SAM. When Roger asked him how it had all happened Balashov let out a torrent of abuse and recrimination, none of it directed against Allied air forces but against the system that had put him in the same piece of sky as was being used at the same time by a massive Allied bombing effort half an hour earlier.

What follows is taken from the account that Roger Pullin put on a tape for the Station Commander a few minutes later.

“As if it wasn’t bad enough being scrambled without close ground control on a general heading towards an unknown target at ‘approximately’ 30–40,000 feet along with a bunch of cowboys in MiG-25s who had never shot at anything in their bloody lives and had no idea whatever about attacking as a formation, with a bunch of bloody Poles behind you and you never knew whether they would simply poke off or have a go at you before they did poke off…”

The Flogger pilot held out his mug for a refill.

“I haven’t got twelve hundred hours on Floggers in thirteen years, and my Sniper badge, just by crawling round the Squadron Commissar. I’d guessed that this one was a biggy and I knew all about F-15s: to stand any chance at all you’ve got to stay low and pray your Sirena’s working so you can pick up the Sparrow lock-on in time to twist away and round it. And so I ignored the brief and went in low level. It was working too; I could hear and see the melees going on above me and I had the main bomber stream, or some of it, on my High Lark radar at 15 miles when I got my tail shot off. Bloody typical: for five years now Flogger pilots have been told to use their ‘initiative’. That was translated by the Squadron boss to mean that if a mission failed because you followed the plan, you should have done your own thing; if you did your own thing and it worked, then that proved that the boss’s plan was flexible; but if the mission failed for whatever reason you should not have done your own thing. Trouble was that the SAM trogs were also being told about initiative and that really was bad news. And in any case, how could you stay a competent fighter pilot and become a mud-mover at the same time if they only let you fly for 90 hours a year. Oh yes, since 1981 they’ve tried to make Flogger G drivers do ground attack as well. Now, if instead they had spent the time and fuel working up big regimental intercept attacks, or even let the Foxbat clowns mix it with the Floggers a bit — but no one at Army Headquarters would ever listen to the Squadron shags. They just push the bloody paper around and watch promotion lists.”

The RAF police had now arrived. Balashov swiftly held out the mug just once more and broke, for the first time, more or less, into English.

“Cheers, comrade. You are good troop.”

He then moved off, a little unsteadily, down the corridor. The Wing Commander reflected, as he watched him go, on the unchanging characteristics of the fighter pilot everywhere — especially at 0430 hours after being shot down by his own side!

It was clear, at least, that they had not yet solved the problem of airspace management on that side either! “[6]