The Third World War (37 page)

It is not yet possible to make a quantitative assessment of the effectiveness of the counter-air offensive; but sufficient is known to say with certainty that, maintained as it was around the clock, it very seriously hindered the Warsaw Pact in achieving its main air objectives.

On the morning of 4 August, after consulting C1NCENT and the
ATAF
and Army Group commanders,
COMAAFCE
allotted a major air effort to armed reconnaissance and interdiction of the battlefield approaches as soon as the main enemy thrust lines were identified. AH the Jaguars, Harriers and AlphaJers in 2
ATAF
were dedicated to this role, and in 4
ATAF
the AlphaJeis and US A-10s were similarly tasked. The French tactical air forces were mainly employed to the south in the 4
ATAF
area, but only, on the orders of their government, in support of forces under French command.

When, later, the enemy’s main effort was identified as being in the north, and the war in the south began to stabilize,
COMAAFCE
progressively switched a proportion of 4
ATAF
aircraft to operations in the NORTHAG-2
ATAF
area; by the evening of 13 August 30 per cent of 4
ATAF
offensive air support potential had been transferred to 2
ATAF
. The crunch point in the Central Region air war was approaching.

At this point it can be seen that three factors had a decisive influence on air activity in support of the land battle. First, the weather throughout the region was uniformly good and the picture was only occasionally obscured by dawn mist and the odd rain shower;

visibility, for the most part, was excellent, and the smoke and dust thrown up by the massive Soviet mechanized forces could be spotted from as far as thirty kilometres away. This was a wonderful help to the Harrier, Jaguar and A-10 crews. Second, as our land forces were pushed back. Allied pilots found themselves fighting over very familiar ground and the reaction lime to army requests for support was thereby reduced.

A combination of these factors did much to offset the enemy’s superior numbers. But these operations were not carried out so effectively without grievious loss. By 11 August the Harrier and Jaguar forces of the
RAF
had been reduced by 50 per cent, and by 13 August the steady attrition of
NATO
aircraft had reached the point where
COMAAFCE
was seriously worried as to whether he would be able to keep up the pace. If they paused, the enemy might have time to recover his balance and redeploy his air power forward and closer to the
FEBA
(forward edge of the battle area), as it shifted westward. In the event, three things came to COMAAFCE’s aid. First was SACEUR’s decision to commit his reserves; second was his rejection of persistent requests for nuclear action. This prompted
COMAAFCE
to seek approval for using the aircraft hitherto held back for nuclear strike, to which
SACEUR
agreed with the proviso that 5 per cent must still be retained. Third was the imminent safe arrival of ihe
CAVALRY
convoys. At COMAAFCE’s request,
SACEUR
then asked
SACLANT
to transfer to him the latter’s Tornado and Buccaneer aircraft. This was immediately agreed, and on the night of 13 August all these aircraft, further augmented by F-lll reinforcements from the United States and the Italian and American reserves from 5
ATAF
waiting in Spain and France, ravaged the Warsaw Pact supply columns and dumps across the length and breadth of the North German plain. This sudden stepping up of the conflict with fresh crews and more aircraft can be said to have regained the air initiative for
NATO
.

As far as air-to-air battles were concerned, over 10,000 air-to-air engagements were registered over, and to the west of, the battle area in the first seven days. As
COMAAFCE
had predicted, the Warsaw Pact threw their mass of aircraft into battle in successive waves and—like the Allies—they supported their operations with every kind of electronic measure. Although the enemy’s air offensive achieved successes and caused moments of great concern at the War Headquarters of Allied Command Europe, it can now be seen that it never succeeded in gaining complete domination of the air.

NATO’s main contribution to the defensive air battle over the Central Region was in the operation of F-4 Phantoms, F-15s and F-16s. A long-standing debate between the British and Americans concerning deployment of air defences had been solved by the adoption of a concept of defence in depth. Thus the first fighter barrier was deployed forward of the
NATO
missile belts to cover the ground forces; this was allotted to the American, Dutch and Belgian F-16s. Behind the missile belt,
RAF
Phantoms and American F-t5s flew combat patrols to complement the rear area point defences. The air defence of France remained a national responsibility.

In the early days of the war. the enemy’s
ECM
and its assault on the
NATO
radar stations seriously degraded the Alliance’scapabilityforclose-controlled interception. But the weather favoured the defence, with good visibility beneath the cloud layer at around 3,000 metres. The inability, or reluctance, of the Warsaw Pact pilots to fly quite low enough offered the defending fighters many skyline sightings as enemy aircraft crossed ridges and hills. The Russians’ strong suit was their numerical superiority and not surprisingly they wanted to preserve it—so in the main their preferred tactics on interception were to evade. On balance, their air combat skills were shown up as inferior to those of the
NATO
pilots.

But the weight of numbers took their toll of the Allied defences. While in the first few days of the war aircraft losses favoured the Alliance in a ratio of three to one, the HA WK
SAM
belt was eventually saturated and those radars that survived the initial onslaught were soon picked off by anti-radar missiles. The air bases themselves were subjected to intense air attack—with the notable exception of the US bases in the 4
ATAF
area over which the F-15s maintained air superiority throughout the war.

But although Warsaw Pact aircraft managed to achieve local air superiority on a number of occasions in the first week of the war, full air support of their ground forces proved impossible to sustain in the face of determined opposition from the F-16sand, on occasion, Harriers armed with air-to-air missiles. But mounting Allied aircraft losses, battle damage and fatigue often left the eventual outcome of this ferocious air fighting very much in doubt.

Although the development of the Warsaw Pact offensive in the Central Region has yet to be followed on the ground (which will be done in the next chapter), coherence and continuity make it desirable to anticipate here its course and outcome sufficiently to carry this tale of the air war over Europe to a conclusion.

COMAAFCE’s first indication of a distinct trend in his favour came with a Soviet attempt to launch airborne and heliborne assaults in support of their attack on the Venio position on 14 August. They did not achieve surprise, and their efforts to gain local air superiority lacked concentration and determination. The ensuing melee in the air to the north and west of the Krefeld salient was greatly enjoyed by the exhausted and hard-pressed German and British soldiers, who afterwards christened it the Venio Turkey Shoot.

When the
NATO
forces improved their command of the air after the sudden release of reserves, local air superiority was exploited by precision-guided weapons on Soviet crossing points over the Lower Rhine and Maas, which helped to throttle the supply lines to enemy leading formations at a critical stage. With enemy divisions to the west of the Rhine isolated,
COMAAFCE
allotted 90 per cent of 4
ATAF
resources to the Commander 2
ATAF
, leaving the remainder oi 4 A1 AF and the remnants of 5
ATAF
to support
CENTAG
. For the next two days this tremendous concentration of airborne firepower wrought havoc with the enemy forces west of the Rhine.

But the air effort stood or fell on the retention of secure bases, a fact of which Allied air commanders had always been uneasily aware. On the very first day of the war some airfields were completely overwhelmed by combinations of high explosive and persistent chemical agents; others sutfered their lull share ot misfortune. But rigorous peacetime exercises m the flexible use of air power now paid dividends. Although airfields, unlike aircraft carriers. could not be sunk, they could be overrun, and in the first days of war the enemy advance in the north forced the abandonment of no less than six German and Dutch airfields. The German Tornados were redeployed to the United Kingdom and their AlphaJe^ moved south. Dutch F-16s moved back into Belgium. When, four days later, the enemy crossed the Lower Rhine the RAF had to withdraw from its airfields. Its attack Tornados and Buccaneers went back to the UK and the reconnaissance Tornados were redeployed to the south. One of the greatest threats to NATO air bases lay in surface-to- surface missile (SSM) attacks as the enemy advanced and deployed his mobile missile systems further west. A co-ordinated missile onslaught on 2 ATAF airfields only just failed to catch the Allied aircraft before their redeployment. It was a very narrow squeak and the lesson was not lost on COMAAFCE, even though, in mounting the attack, the missile batteries gave away their positions and earned a particularly sharp and quick Allied air response.

The Warsaw Pact air forces did not achieve their objectives to the full principally because they failed to gain tactical surprise and the Allied air forces were ready and waiting for them. In addition, NATO’s electronic warfare was of a superior quality throughout the campaign, and the Allied aircraft and their crews, as had always been hoped, proved significantly superior in technology and skills. The Allied defence plan had required the air forces to stem the Warsaw Pact flood and hold the ring until the armies were reinforced and in battle order. In this they succeeded. The furious air actions, air-to-air, air-to-ground and ground-to-air, vindicated classical air thinking over half a century. It also qualified some of the commandments in the airmen’s bible in important ways. For instance, while airmen rightly saw the need to fight the air battle above all, in the circumstances of this war they learned that there is no convenient tempo which can allow them to meet their tasks in the ordered sequence so beloved of the Staff Colleges. The airman’s belief, born of Second World War experience, and so irritating to the soldiers, that the chronology of war shoud allow them to fight the air battle and establish air superiority before addressing the problems of the land battle, was shattered once and for all. Everything had happened together.

Given the limited resources that the West were prepared to devote to defence before the Third World War, the air forces saw the need to compete above all in qualitative terms. In this they were right; they would have been right in any circumstances—for a second-rate air force is an expensive national indulgence—but it is worth underlining the point that once the qualitative margin narrows between opposing sides then numbers become very important indeed. It was because of this that COMAAFCE’s counter-air offensive was so important. Happily the aircraft, weapons and electronic attack systems specially designed for this task proved highly successful and did more than anything else to offset the numerical advantage of the Warsaw Pact in the air.

Outside the European theatre, but of crucial importance to it, a new air factor was manifested in the transatlantic air bridge. Despite the early lessons from the Berlin airlift back in the late forties. Western European strategists had been slow to see air transport except in terms of an extension of existing logistic support. Not so with the Americans, or for that matter the Russians, who in 1977-8 set up an air bridge lo the Horn of Africa that even in those days moved tanks to Ethiopia in large Antonov transports. The reality was that air transport had now become one of the major strategic manifesta-tions of air power. It was therefore particularly ironic that the British, in their defence economies of the seventies, should have so drastically cut back their air transport force—a cut which forced their planners to rely on the use of car ferries and steamers to and from the Hook of Holland in their efforts to find ways of getting British reinforcements to the Northern Army Group. Such measures were more reminiscent of the Paris taxis used to move troops up to the Marne in 1914 than appropriate to the development of air power in the second half of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the most vivid vindication of classical air thinking was the organization of the command system of the Allied Air Forces in Europe in the early 1970s. It had long been the claim of the airmen that if the flexibility and capacity for concentration of air power was to be exploited then the air must be centrally organized. This was indeed what happened, very much under US influence and pressure, when a single air command was set up under
COMAAFCE
in Europe. When the lock was forced at the northern end of the region and the entire Northern Army Group was swung back like a huge door hinged on Kassel, it was this organization which enabled
COMAAFCE
to swing his air forces through ninety degrees to an east-west north-facing axis in a matter of hours. By the same token he was able to accept the suddenly released reserves and apply them promptly to the battle to which air power made such a decisive contribution.

Early on 13 August it was confirmed to
SACEUR
that the transatlantic convoys proceeding from the United States were at last within the U K. Air Defence Region, under air cover operating from bases in France and the United Kingdom. Losses to personnel brought across by air (which included most of the units in reinforcing formations, together with the greater part of their light and some heavy equipment), had been high. Losses at sea to the ships bringing the balance of the heavy equipment, with considerable numbers of men and invaluable munitions, had also been heavy. Nevertheless there was now an early prospect of augmentation of the forces available to Allied Command Europe by some four divisions, together with a corps headquarters and corps and army troops. The massive build-up which Soviet action had been planned to forestall was already under way.