Warsaw Pact Deployment on the Central Front II

Map from Strategic Geography: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Superpowers; by Hugh Faringdon; 1989

NON-SOVIET WARSAW PACT ARMIES

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia had two armies: the 1st (Czech) Army (comprising one tank and three motor-rifle divisions), with its headquarters at Příbram, and the 4th (Czech) Army (two tank, two motor-rifle divisions) at Písek. Each of these Czech armies had a larger than normal engineer component, with one engineer brigade, one bridging brigade and one construction brigade in each army, with more under central control. Total strength of the Czechoslovak army (1984) was 148,000, of which approximately 100,000 were conscripts.

East Germany

The German Democratic Republic’s Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) was considered to be both the most efficient and the most loyal of the satellite armies, and fielded two armies: the 3rd (NVA) Army, with its headquarters at Leipzig, and the 5th (NVA) Army at Neubrandenburg. Both consisted of one tank and two motor-rifle divisions, all of which were maintained at Category A (90–100 per cent strength) in peacetime and were backed by a very efficient mobilization system. The total peacetime strength of the NVA was some 120,000 (1984), of which 71,500 were conscripts.

Poland

Poland provided three armies, which in peacetime were based in each of the three military districts, and virtually all of which were scheduled to come under direct Soviet command in war:

• Silesian Military District – one army of three tank and two motor-rifle divisions;

• Pomeranian Military District – one army of two tank and two motor-rifle divisions;

• Warsaw Military District – one army of three motor-rifle divisions but no tank divisions.

The 6th Airborne Brigade was stationed in the Pomeranian Military District, and the 7th Sea Landing Brigade was stationed on the Baltic coast, from where it would have taken part in amphibious operations against Denmark in war. The Polish army did not have the specialist engineer brigades found in the Czech and East German armies. The total strength of the Polish army in 1984 was 210,000, of which 153,000 were conscripts.

Unlike their opponents in NATO, where commonality ceased at corps level, the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact forces were all organized on Soviet lines and used mainly Soviet equipment, some of which, such as tanks, was manufactured locally under licence. The equipment was not, however, exclusively Soviet, and Czechoslovakia, for example, produced armoured personnel carriers and self-propelled guns to its own designs, some of which were also used by Poland.

WARSAW PACT PARACHUTE FORCES

Soviet Airborne Forces

Throughout the Cold War the Soviets maintained by far the largest airborne forces in the world, and, as in most armies, these enjoyed an elite status, with special equipment and special uniforms (including a sky-blue beret). Their importance was further emphasized by the fact that they were not part of the normal army chain of command, but were subordinated direct to the Ministry of Defence. There were seven airborne divisions, all of which were maintained at Category A in peacetime, each consisting of three airborne regiments, an artillery regiment and an air-defence battalion, together with communications, engineers and logistic units – a total of some 8,500 men. In war they would have been tasked directly by the Ministry of Defence for a major strategic mission or allocated to lower headquarters for specific operations, possibly on a scale of one airborne division to each major front, or probably more than one in the case of the Western TVD.

Soviet airborne forces were equipped with a large range of lightweight equipment, which was specially designed for the airborne role. Such airborne items ranged from self-propelled guns and tracked personnel carriers to lightweight folding saws, and airborne troops were always the first to receive new standard weapons, such as 5.56 mm rifles.

Soviet airborne units were particularly intended for desantnyy missions – a Russian term denoting operations in enemy rear areas, carried out in co-ordination with the forward elements of the ground troops, and with the aim of maintaining the high momentum and continuity of the offensive. Such missions would almost certainly have included the traditional airborne task of seizing vital ground or crossings in advance of major thrusts by ground troops, possibly as the opening move in a war in western Europe. Probable missions would have included seizing bridgeheads across major rivers, such as the Elbe, Weser and Rhine; capturing forward airfields; and attacking nuclear-supply points, communications centres and major logistics concentrations. This was confirmed by Marshal Sokolovskiy:

In the last war, airborne troops were used chiefly for support of ground troops in defeating enemy groupings, while now they must also perform independently such missions as [the] capture and retention or destruction of nuclear missile, air force and naval bases, and other important objectives deep within the theatres of military operations.

The airborne troops had a flexible organization, being designed to conduct operations in divisional, regimental or battalion strengths, depending upon the requirement. The normal tactic was for pathfinders to form the first wave of the assault, arriving in the battle area by parachute, with the aim of securing the drop zone (DZ) and marking it for the main assault force, which arrived after a minimal interval and dropped together with its heavy equipment. In most larger operations securing an airfield or creating an airstrip would have been a high priority, to enable later troops and heavy equipment to be air-landed rather than air-dropped. Soviet airborne troops’ tactics were always very aggressive, and as soon as sufficient men were available they began a rapid expansion to link the DZs to each other, coupled with raids and assaults on any enemy units encountered.

The fixed-wing aircraft were provided by Voyenno-Transportnaya Aviatsiya (Military Transport Aviation (VTA)), which comprised some 1,700 aircraft, providing sufficient lift for the assault elements of two airborne divisions simultaneously. From the mid-1970s onwards three basic aircraft were used, the smallest being the four-turboprop Antonov An-12 (NATO = ‘Cub’), which carried eighty paratroops or an equivalent load of equipment and was equivalent to the USAF’s Lockheed C-130 Hercules. The second and larger aircraft was the Ilyushin Il–76 (NATO = ‘Candid’), powered by four turbojets, which carried 150 paratroops. Largest of all was the Antonov An-22 (NATO = ‘Cock’), which was capable of air-dropping either men or equipment, although it seems unlikely that this would have been done in any but the most benign environment, the aircraft depending instead upon the early capture of an airfield. The VTA was reinforced by further transport aircraft from the Soviet state airline, Aeroflot, which were intended to be used virtually straight away for air-landing operations, although they required lengthy preparations before undertaking parachute drops.

The VTA took part in all major exercises, but also obtained valuable operational experience in conducting the airlifts to Prague in 1968, to Egypt and Syria during the 1973 Middle East War, to Ethiopia in 1978 and in the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Soviet airborne doctrine was that objectives should be a maximum of 400 km from the front line for a divisional operation and a maximum of 100 km for a battalion operation. Relief by ground troops was intended to take place between two and seven days after the landing, although experience by all armies in the Second World War suggested that such a meeting seldom went according to plan.

Unless there was a reasonable expectation of total surprise, an airborne assault would be preceded by intense air and artillery operations to destroy enemy air defences along the line of the proposed route. Following that, the transports would fly across friendly territory at medium height before descending to low level to cross the front line for the approach to the assault area. The aircraft formed into a stream for the actual drop, which took place at a height of between 400 m and 1,000 m and a speed of 330 km/h, with intervals between the waves. Divisional operations used between four and six DZs, each approximately 4 km long and 3 km wide.

Other Warsaw Pact Airborne Forces

The other Warsaw Pact countries all maintained a parachuting capability: East Germany, Poland and Romania each had a brigade-size force; Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia a regiment; while Hungary had one battalion. All were organized along Soviet lines and used Soviet equipment, methods and tactics.

CONCLUSION

According to NATO’s 1984 assessment, the Central Region (and the southern part of the Northern Region) was faced by some ninety-five divisions from the Soviet, East German, Polish and Czechoslovak armies. Of those, some sixty-one divisions (16,620 tanks and 10,270 artillery pieces and heavy mortars) were either deployed in the forward areas or held at a high state of readiness and could have attacked within a few days of mobilization. There were also seven airborne and two air-mobile divisions, based in the USSR, which could have been allocated specific missions within the Central Region, and a division-sized amphibious force in the Baltic. They were armed with some of the finest equipment in the world, and the three forward Soviet armies were positioned much closer to the IGB than were their opponents, adding to the Alliance’s fear of a ‘bolt from the blue’. But they never attacked.

Civil Air Transport (CAT)

General Claire Lee Chennault did not fade away after WWII. He divorced Nell Thompson in 1946 and in late 1947 married Anna Chen, a young Chinese journalist. He became an outspoken critic and opponent of Communism in the Far East. In 1946 he organized a civilian airline in China, which airlifted supplies to Nationalist forces fighting in the interior until the end of the civil war. The airline was reorganized in 1948 as the Civil Air Transport (CAT), one of the largest air-cargo carriers in the world. This airline would become the Central Intelligence Agency's first "proprietary" enterprise and played a covert role in the Korean War, Indochina, North Vietnam, Laos, and Tibet as well as at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Once again China's leaders called upon Chennault to form an air service. And once again Chennault answered their call, this time by forming the Civil Air Transport (CAT), whose acronym suggests to some a symbolic connection to the past. Chennault's business manager and partner Whiting Willaeur, for example, noted, "CAT comes pretty close to spelling Tiger." But this was a different breed of cat.

In May 1946, Chennault returned to the United States to seek financing for his new air service. With the help of former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who was now director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, Chennault arranged a loan and bought 19 surplus Curtiss C-46 Commandos and Douglas C-47 Skytrains. Chennault and Willaeur recruited a group of ex-military personnel to maintain and fly them, including former American Volunteer Group pilots Joe Rosbert and Erik Shilling. The CAT took to the air on January 31, 1947, flying the first relief cargo west from Canton (Guangzhou). As Chennault noted later, it flew "under the sign of a new and more docile Flying Tiger." 

At the same time, another group of former AVG pilots- headed by Bob Prescott and including Bill Bartling, Duke Hedman, Robert "Catfish" Raines, Dick Rossi, and other Flying Tigers-were forming an airline in the United States. It eventually bore the name of the Flying Tiger Line. Rossi flew as a captain with the freight line for about 25 years, logging a lifetime of more than 25,000 flying hours.

On December 21, 1947, Claire Chennault and Anna Chan exchanged marriage vows in a simple wedding at the general's house in Shanghai. Anna, the well-educated, petite, and alluring daughter of the Chinese consul to San Francisco, became Chennault's adoring and devoted companion for the rest of his life. 

By April 1948, Chennault's air service was operating successfully, hauling tons of materials a month and helping to lift China back on its feet. By then, the civil war in China between the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Ze-dong), which Chiang had anticipated for years, had erupted and was in full swing. Chennault regretted that "some Chinese people are in open rebellion against their government-thereby delaying the rehabilitation of their country and diminishing its prestige as a world power.  "At first, however, he did not "feel it is my duty to participate in this needless, bitter conflict. My desire is to aid all Chinese." But as the civil war wore on, Chennault became increasingly anti-Communist. 

Chennault became more and more convinced that the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia posed a threat to the United States and to the Free World. He and Willaeur decided to cast their lot with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and to use the CAT to support his forces. With regard to China's ongoing civil war, Chennault figured that his old friend Chiang possessed "both the desire and the power to clear the situation rapidly." But he misjudged Chiang's military capabilities. 

During the Communist siege of Mukden, Manchuria, the CAT airlifted in thousands of tons of food, medicine, and other essential supplies. On return trips, CAT pilots and planes ferried out noncombatants and wounded soldiers. But Mukden became a death trap for entire Nationalist armies, flown in and supplied by CAT. At one point, Chennault's crews flew as many as 50 missions a day, braving artillery fire and landing on hastily built airfields to sustain Chiang's armies. But Mukden fell to the Communists, as did Manchuria and northern China. 

Thereafter, the Communists forced the Nationalists to withdraw first to Canton and finally to Taiwan. Chennault and the CAT moved with the Nationalists to Taiwan in October 1949-but not before losing, for all practical purposes, 73 of his airplanes to the Communists. Despite its losses and a subsequent battle with insolvency, Chennault's CAT weathered the squalls of adversity and continued to operate but only on a shoestring-nothing new to Chennault.

When war broke out in Korea in 1950, the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acquired the Civil Air Transport from Chennault, Willaeur, and other stockholders. The CIA used CAT planes to fly troops and supplies in support of the United Nations. And when French troops were surrounded by Communist forces at Dien Bien Phu in French Indochina (Vietnam) in 1954, CAT pilots in Fairchild C -119 Flying Boxcars flew many flights to parachute urgently needed supplies to the beleaguered French soldiers. 

On one relief flight into Dien Bien Phu, pilot James McGovern-nicknamed "Earthquake McGoon" after Al Capp's lovable villain in the comic strip Li'l Abner-and his copilot Wallace Buford, were attempting to airdrop six tons of ammunition when a shell from a Soviet-built 37-mm gun knocked out one of the engines of their twin-engine Boxcar. It began losing altitude rapidly. 

Another shell tore into one of the Boxcar's twin booms that supported the plane's tail surfaces. Buford and a crew of French cargo handlers stayed with the crippled aircraft while McGovern tried to coax it beyond the encircled French fortifications lest its cargo detonate among the besieged troops below. "It looks like this is it, "McGovern was heard to say to Buford over an open microphone. An instant later, the cargo plane struck a ridge and exploded. In that instant, McGovern and Buford may have become the first American casualties of the Vietnam War. 

Under the CIA, the airline eventually became known as Air America and joined an expanding war in Vietnam, where, in the words of historian William M. Leary Jr. it would "pay a price in blood that would make [Dien Bien Phu] pale in comparison." 

Later in 1954, after the subsequent French defeat by the Communist Vietminh forces and the partitioning of French Indochina into North and South Vietnam, Chennault again returned to the United States on a mission. His task this time was to rally support for his proposal for a 470-member International Volunteer Group (IVG) to be modeled on his highly successful American Volunteer Group. The old warrior intended the IVG to be used to stem the spreading threat of Communism in Southeast Asia without the direct involvement of the United States. He managed to attract the interest of a few important people in the military and political arenas but to little avail. Opposing factions in the Departments of State and Defense finally squelched his efforts. Chennault would lead no more.

LINK

ICBM BASING I

Test launch of a Peacekeeper ICBM by the 1st Strategic Aerospace Division(1 STRAD).

The original German A-4 missile employed a brilliantly simple road-mobile system, in which the missile was carried on a four-wheeled trailer known as a Meillerwagen. When the missile was to be launched, the Meillerwagen raised it to the vertical and then lowered it on to a small launch platform. Each site had a crew of 136 men, with many more men and vehicles in the logistics chain.

The Germans also gave active consideration to launching the A-4 missile from a train. According to a 1944 plan, each train would carry six ready-to-use missiles, and include an erector–launcher car, seven fuel-tanker cars, a generator car, a workshop, a spares car and several cars for the crew. On top of this, however, the train would also carry all the vehicles normally associated with a missile battery, in order that the unit could dismount from the train and operate independently of it, which brought the whole battery up to the unwieldy total of seventy to eighty freight cars, probably requiring at least two separate trains. Separate logistic trains were planned to bring further supplies of fuel and missiles. Prototype trains were running before the end of the war, but the system was not a practicable proposition in view of the air supremacy of the Allies, for whom all trains were a high-priority target.

ICBM forces were originally built to threaten the opponent’s civil population, which in itself was not a difficult task: the warheads were relatively inaccurate, but the cities were large and the warheads powerful. It was obviously highly desirable, from both political and military viewpoints, to defend the population from this threat, in the same way that bombers had been opposed by a mixture of fighters and anti-aircraft guns during the recent war. It was not feasible at the time to intercept incoming ICBMs, so the only defence was to attack the ICBMs at their source, which could be done only by conducting a pre-emptive strike with other ICBMs. Thus the position was rapidly reached where the ICBMs’ principal target was the other side’s ICBMs, moving on to other missions only when that first battle had been decided. It was therefore necessary to optimize the attacking potential of one’s own missiles while ensuring their survivability in the face of an opponent’s first strike. There were four possibilities:

• superhardened silos, which would withstand even the most powerful incoming warhead;

• using a greater number of silos than missiles, so that the opponent would waste warheads on empty silos;

• making the missiles mobile, as the Germans did, so that the enemy could not locate them;

• using anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) defences.

The essence of the problem can be illustrated by a simplified example in which the aggressor (A) has 100 ICBMs, each with ten warheads, while the other side (B) has 500 ICBMs, each with three warheads. (For the purpose of this example, all missiles and warheads are perfectly available and reliable, and each warhead will kill one silo.) Thus A is capable of destroying 1,000 silos, and if he carries out a pre-emptive strike he requires to use only fifty missiles, leaving B with no missiles. A still has fifty missiles and is clearly the winner. If, however, B builds another 500 silos, but no more missiles, and spreads his 500 ICBMs randomly among the 1,000 silos, A, not knowing which silos are occupied, must attack all 1,000. Both sides then end up with zero ICBMs, which is a better outcome for B than the first, but is unsatisfactory from a military point of view. But if B now builds a total of 2,000 silos, half his missiles (i.e. 250) must survive the attack.

Silos

The first missiles, such as the early Atlas and Thor, were located in a shed, primarily for protection from the weather, and were taken out to enable them to be raised to the vertical for fuelling and launch. The missiles were also located close to each other. Both factors together made the missiles extremely vulnerable to incoming missiles, which did not need to be too accurate to achieve a kill.

The next step was to place the missiles in semi-hardened shelters and to separate these shelters so that one incoming warhead could not destroy more than one missile. In addition, the shelters had split roofs, so that the missile could be raised, fuelled and launched without wasting time moving it out on to a launch pad. As the perception of the threat increased, the spacing between individual missiles increased yet further and the shelters became bunkers, recessed into the ground.

The next step was to mount the missile vertically rather than horizontally, and to put it in a hole in the ground. The USAF, however, adopted a ‘halfway’ system with the Atlas and Titan I missiles, in which the missile stood upright in a silo which, in the case of Atlas, was some 53 m deep and 16 m in diameter, resting on the launch platform, which was counterbalanced by a 150 tonne weight. The launch procedure involved fuelling the missile in the silo and then using hydraulic rams to raise the entire launch platform and missile to the surface, where the missile was then launched. Titan I had a super-fast fuelling system and a high-speed elevator which reduced reaction time to approximately twenty minutes, while the silo and all associated facilities were hardened to withstand an overpressure of 20 kgfcm2.

A completely new launch system was introduced with Titan II, in which the missile was launched direct from the silo. There was, however, considerable concern about the effects of the rocket efflux on the missile during the few seconds that the missile was still inside the silo, so the missile rested on a large flame deflector, which directed the efflux into two large ducts exhausting to the atmosphere a short distance from the silo. Each missile complex was 45 m deep and 17 m wide and occupied nine levels, which housed electrical power, air conditioning, ventilation, and environmental protection, as well as hazard sensors and the associated corrective devices. At the centre was the launch duct, in which the missile was suspended in an environmentally controlled atmosphere. A walkway extended from the missile silo to a blast lock which provided controlled access between the silo and the tunnels leading upward to the above-ground access and laterally to the launch-control centre (LCC). The LCC was a three-level, shock-isolated cage suspended from a reinforced-concrete dome and housed two officers and two enlisted men. As with the Titan I silo, the Titan II silo was hardened to 20 kgfcm2.

When it learned that the Soviets were launching direct from the silo, the USAF followed suit and the Minuteman I missile became the first US missile to use the ‘hot launch’, in which the missile rose from the silo surrounded by the flames and smoke from the rocket motor. The next Soviet innovation was the ‘cold launch’, in which a gas generator within the silo produced a pressure sufficient to propel the missile some 20–30 m clear of the silo before its first-stage motor fired. This protected the silo from damage, enabling it to be reused within a fairly short space of time. It was used by the Soviets from the SS-17 onwards, and by the USAF in Peacekeeper (MX).

Following their introduction in the mid-1960s, underground silos became increasingly complicated and expensive structures. Ideally they were located at a relatively high altitude, to improve the missiles’ range, and in springy ground, to absorb as much as possible of the shock waves from incoming warheads. The silo was a vertical, steelreinforced-concrete tube, housing an elaborate suspension and shock-isolation system which supported the missile as well as providing further insulation to minimize the transfer of shock motion from the walls and floor of the silo to the missile. The top third of the silo housed maintenance and launch facilities, which were known as the ‘head works’ in USAF parlance. Finally, the missile tube was capped by a massive sliding door, which provided protection against overpressure by transmitting the shock caused by the explosion of an incoming warhead to the cover supports rather than to the vertical tube containing the missile; it also provided protection against radiation and EMP effects. The door was designed to sweep the area as it opened, to prevent debris falling into the silo tube and possibly interfering with the launch process.

Individual silos were grouped together for control purposes, but were sited sufficiently far apart to ensure that one incoming warhead could not destroy more than one missile. Control was exercised by an underground command centre, manned by a small crew of watchkeepers, whose functions included operating the dual-key safety system in which launch could be authorized only by two officers acting independently. This command centre was linked to its superior headquarters and to the individual silos under its control by telecommunications and by systems-monitoring links. This introduced a further problem: the vulnerability of these links to blast and, in particular, to electromagnetic pulses (EMP). Making these links survivable against the perceived threats (known as ‘nuclear hardening’) became an increasingly complex and expensive undertaking as the Cold War progressed.

The protection factor (‘hardness’) of a silo was measured by its ability to withstand the overpressure resulting from the blast effects of a nuclear explosion, and was expressed in kilograms-force per square centimetre (kgfcm2) or pounds per square inch (psi) (1 kgfcm2≈14.2 psi). In the USA, the Atlas, Titan I and Titan II silos were constructed with a hardness of 20 kgfcm2 (300 psi), while the Minuteman I silos (mid-1960s) were built with a hardness of some 85 kgfcm2 (1,200 psi). Finally, in the 1970s, Minuteman IIIPeacekeeper silos were built with a hardness of 140 kgfcm2 (2,000 psi). By this time, however, the silos were so expensive that, despite reports that the Soviets were ‘superhardening’ their silos to resist overpressures of 425 kgfcm2 (6,000 psi), Congress repeatedly refused to authorize any further hardening of US silos.

The Soviet programme of silo building, refurbishment and hardening was more successful. The earliest silos, built before 1969, were hardened to withstand an overpressure of some 7 kgfcm2 (100 psi), with the next generation built to 20 kgfcm2 (300 psi). Those built in the early 1970s for the SS-18 could withstand 425 kgfcm2 (6,000 psi), which was achieved using concrete reinforced by concentric steel rings.