The Cold War: A MILITARY History (57 page)

A SURPRISE ATTACK

Throughout the Cold War NATO claimed that it was possible for the Warsaw Pact to carry out a surprise attack, in the course of which NATO’s
in-place
forces could have been overwhelmed before their reinforcements could have reached them. Certainly the later moves during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, when the Soviet and East German divisions suddenly closed up to the border with West Germany, showed that such a move was at least possible.

Such an attack would have fitted in with Soviet military thinking, since the Category-A forces facing NATO could have attacked from a ‘standing start’ with the aim of throwing NATO off balance and gaining time until, first, the Category-A units in the western USSR arrived to take over, followed by the Category-B units, which would have taken longer to mobilize.

Both sides, but particularly the West, had very complicated mobilization and deployment plans, which involved a lengthy series of interlocking and mutually dependent events. Many of the elements of these plans were tested in peacetime, but the realism of the tests was constrained by peacetime actualities: before an exercise, for example, merchant ships and civil aircraft had to be ordered months in advance, to enable owners to programme their availability; in the real thing, they would have been required at very short notice, without argument, and commercial compensation would have been a matter for later negotiations. Further, the sheer scale and complexity of the totality of the plans was impossible to test.

There can be no doubt that the military staffs in NATO and in national capitals would have been pressing hard for the politicians to make the decisions necessary to start the mobilization process. Nor can there be much doubt that most politicians in most countries in any situation short of an all-out Warsaw Pact attack would have been urging caution, counselling patience, questioning the validity of the intelligence assessments, indicating the escalatory nature of mobilization, seeking other ways of resolving the crisis, and, in all probability, declining at least some of the military requests.

Such decision-making processes were, of course, practised in peacetime exercises, but there were two factors which caused possible disputes to be played down. The first was that an exercise, by definition, was not the ‘real thing’ and thus arguments and pressures which could have arisen in reality were either glossed over or ignored altogether. Second, there was strong pressure to keep an exercise moving forward in accordance with a planning timetable, in order that all phases of the war could be practised before the unalterable end-of-exercise time was reached. This in itself prevented any major problem being allowed to delay matters for too long.

Had the reality ever arisen, however, dissension in the North Atlantic Council, particularly over calling Simple Alert and Reinforced Alert and in setting national mobilizations in train, was highly likely and could have proved very difficult to resolve. The military would then have pressed even harder for action, arguing that their plans would disintegrate into chaos if held back for too long, and pointing out the disasters that would occur if the
Warsaw
Pact attacked before all NATO’s troops were deployed. Such differences of opinion within the Alliance would have been exploited for all they were worth by the Soviets and their supporters in the West.

The August 1914 Precedent

The lesson of August 1914 was very relevant to NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the Cold War. In the hothouse climate of Europe in 1910–14, most countries were tied into one of the major alliances; the rest were neutral. The general staff of the likely belligerents, all of whom, except for Great Britain, had conscript armies, had prepared the most detailed mobilization and deployment plans (and Britain, too, needed to mobilize certain categories of reservists if war was imminent). Such mobilization could be either total or partial in order to meet a specific threat from a particular country or group of countries.

Under such plans, the announcement of national mobilization would set in train a series of events. This began with individuals being required to report within a designated time to specified depots, where they would be kitted out; then, as soon as the units were formed, they were automatically moved to a designated location, which was part of the national war plan. Such movement was almost entirely by railway, plus, in the case of France, sea transport from North Africa to the metropolitan country, and, in the case of the UK, ferries across the Channel. These plans necessitated manually prepared and controlled timetables of extraordinary complexity, which were carefully intermeshed with each other; as a result, the whole mobilization process became very rigid and inflexible.

For the general staffs, there were two major dangers. The first was that a potential enemy could, quite literally, steal a march by completing its mobilization process first. Thus mobilization itself became an act of war. The second was that, in every country, the mobilization plans could not start without a political decision, except for some very minor preliminary moves. As a result, when the time came in July/August 1914, the generals had to demand the mobilization order early and often, until it was actually given.

The deed which sparked the First World War mobilizations was a totally unexpected event – the murder in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on 28 June 1914. This generated an ever-deepening crisis until Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, whereupon Imperial Russia ordered mobilization against Austria-Hungary, but not against Germany, with whom at that time it had no immediate quarrel. Germany, however, demanded that Russia should demobilize; when the latter refused, Germany, fearing attack, declared war and started full mobilization on 1 August. France, knowing that this made a German attack inevitable, ordered mobilization on the same day. Germany, in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan (as modified by Helmuth von Moltke, the younger), thereupon
declared
war on France and invaded neutral Belgium on 4 August, the latter act provoking an ultimatum from Great Britain. When the Germans rejected this, Great Britain declared war on Germany and also mobilized.

In hindsight, the whole business possessed a dreadful inevitability, as the political and military leaders, like lemmings leaping over a Norwegian cliff, rushed helter-skelter to war. For those taking part, however, it was a nightmare period as each general staff sought to ensure that its nation was not caught off-balance.

During the Cold War, NATO’s plans too were extraordinarily detailed and interdependent, and there was a strong possibility that their complexity and inflexibility were such that a situation analogous to that of August 1914 might have arisen. Thus a modern equivalent of the ‘tyranny of the railway timetables’ could have forced leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain into a war which few of them, like most of the leaders in 1914, really wanted. If the result in 1914 was dire, however, the consequences of such a mobilization race during the Cold War would have been unimaginably worse.

fn1
FALLEX = Fall [i.e. Autumn] Exercise; CIMEX = Civil/Military Exercise. Both were normally suffixed by the year – e.g. FALLEX84.

fn2
Reserved circuits were those which had been identified for NATO use and pre-booked with national telecommunications authorities (e.g.
Deutsches Bundespost
(the German Federal Telecommunications Authority)) for activation in a crisis.

fn3
These contingency plans are fully described in Chapter 32.

32

Berlin: Front-Line City of the Cold War

THROUGHOUT THE COLD
War there was no other place or group of people that epitomized the issues at stake as clearly as Berlin and the Berliners; indeed, on more than one occasion, events in and around Berlin dragged Europe – and the world – to the brink of war. The city’s curious status stemmed in part from its role as the traditional capital first of Prussia and then of united Germany (from 1871), but mainly from its political and emotional significance as the capital city of, first, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Imperial Germany and subsequently of Hitler’s Third Reich. Thus the very name ‘Berlin’ struck a chill into the hearts of its enemies, and reaching and controlling it became the symbolic military goal of all four Allies during the Second World War.

THE LEGAL POSITION

In international law, the four occupying powers derived their rights and status in Berlin from the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945. This was formalized by a declaration issued on 5 June 1945, under which, in the absence of any German central government or authority, the Four Powers assumed supreme authority over the country.
¹

The post-war status of Germany was first considered by the American–British–Soviet European Advisory Commission (EAC),
^fn1
which began its meetings in London in early 1944. This group quickly decided that Germany would be divided into three zones of occupation, giving the USSR an area stretching to within 100 km of the Rhine and including some 36 per cent of the population and 33 per cent of the country’s industrial resources.
Berlin
was deep inside this proposed Soviet zone, but was designated a ‘special area’ which would be occupied by and come under the joint administration of the three Allied powers.
^fn2
This was subsequently documented in the London Protocol of 12 September 1944, although the Yalta Conference of Heads of State (4–11 February 1945) later amended this to include a French Zone of Occupation and a French sector in Berlin. Significantly, the EAC was unable to agree on the methods of access to the Western garrisons in Berlin from their occupation zones, thus creating a problem which was to endure for some forty-five years.

When the Red Army took Berlin on 2 May 1945 it found a devastated city, which had been heavily bombed by both the British and the US air forces, and then subjected to relentless Soviet artillery shelling during the final battle. Some 3 million inhabitants had survived. At an inter-Allied meeting in Berlin on 29 June the details of the Western move into the city were agreed with the Russians, and the British and the Americans were allocated the use (but not the control) of one main highway and one railway line each, plus two air corridors. They used these routes to move their occupation forces to Berlin, starting on 1 July, and were followed later by the French.

Initially ‘the four occupying powers’, acting through the Allied Kommandantura, administered the city as a self-contained entity, quite separate from the four zones of occupation (i.e. the American, British, French and Soviet zones), and for administrative purposes the city was subdivided into four sectors, each controlled by one of these powers. Despite these arrangements having been agreed relatively amicably, the problem of access for the three Western garrisons raised itself immediately, since it was obvious that regular contact was required with the Western occupation zones, but they were physically separated from these by a wide stretch of Soviet-controlled territory.
^fn3

Air access was negotiated and agreed in a written document, signed on 30 November 1945, which guaranteed the use of three corridors, each 32 km wide. A further agreement established a quadripartite Berlin Air Safety Centre (BASC), which managed an air-control zone 32 km in radius and was also responsible for regulating traffic in the corridors from Berlin to the boundaries of adjacent control zones. BASC operated continuously from 12 December 1945 to 31 December 1990, providing a twenty-four-hour service, and was the one Allied body from which the Soviets never withdrew. All flight plans – giving full details of the planned route, height, arrival and departure times, and speed – had to be filed at the BASC and agreed before
an
aircraft could enter the air-control zone. At the time this agreement was signed, the practical height limit for contemporary transport aircraft was some 3,050 m, and, while this was not written into the agreement, this became accepted ‘by custom and practice’, together with a minimum of 914 m.
^fn4

Unfortunately, no equivalent formal agreement was ever achieved for the use of the overland access routes by road, rail and canal. All three were originally used in 1945–6 and were then maintained by custom and practice, although they were subject to frequent interference by the Soviet and (later) East German authorities.

POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS

When the planning for setting up the Federal Republic of Germany began in 1949, the German drafters of the proposed Federal Constitution (Basic Law) included a statement in Article 23 in which ‘Greater Berlin’ was listed as the twelfth
Land
of the Federal Republic.
^fn5
The three Western Allies’ military governors, however, prevented this in a letter dated 12 May 1949, denying authority for Berlin to be declared a
Land
and also stipulating that, while Berlin might send a small number of representatives to the Bundestag (Federal parliament) and the Bundesrat (Senate), they had to be non-voting.
^fn6
The Allied Kommandantura later also stated that Federal legislation had to be voted into Berlin law by the Magistrat (the Berlin City Assembly) before it could become valid in Berlin.

The Federal Republic of Germany duly came into being on 21 September 1949 (though still formally occupied by the Western Allies), and the Soviets responded on 7 October by declaring that the Soviet Occupation Zone had been redesignated the German Democratic Republic (GDR), with its capital in Berlin. This was followed by announcements on 10 October that the Soviet Military Administration had been redesignated the Control Commission, and on 12 November that the Soviet military governor had transferred his functions to the East Berlin Magistrat.

The position of West Berlin was further redefined in 1952, when the ‘Relations Convention’ was under discussion. On 26 May 1952 the three Western Allies informed the Federal chancellor that, while they formally maintained their position that West Berlin should remain excluded from the Federal Republic, they would nevertheless permit the Federal Republic to provide economic assistance to West Berlin, where the currency would be the West German Deutschmark (DM). Thus, by the late 1950s, and with little change for the remainder of the Cold War, the position in West Berlin was that: