The Third World War (41 page)

There was, in fact, considerable Soviet conventional bombing of French ports and communications complexes. Since, however, penetration by hostile aircraft was for the great part of their journey over land and through several belts of air defence, the damage that was done, where it mattered most to the Allied war effort (above all in the Western ports), was not intolerably great.

Quite as much hindrance, and possibly even more, to the prosecution of the war in France came from civil disturbance. War with the Soviet Union stripped the mask from many professing Euro-communism in France, as in Italy and other countries. An impressively well-prepared Peace Movement burgeoned on the streets at once. Demonstrations, strikes and sabotage led to frequent clashes between communist and Gaullist sympathizers and a growing strain on the police, in whose support troops sometimes had to intervene. Widespread avoidance of call-up was accompanied by a sharp rise in petty crime. Food and petrol rationing, introduced on mobilization, never worked and perhaps were scarcely expected to. On the whole, nevertheless, France moved towards a war footing without intolerable upheaval, largely because the overwhelming majority of the French people were seen to be plainly in favour of resistance to the Soviet initiative.

Conditions were much the same in the Low Countries, with the added pressure of the immediate danger of invasion in both Belgium and the Netherlands, and, in the case of the latter, the burden of partial occupation by the enemy within a very few days. Resistance in Holland was slow to get under way in the Second World War, due to the habits formed over a long period of neutrality. When it found its ffet it was formidable. In the Third World War there were many still in Holland who remembered how -it had been before. Underground movements began to come into being as soon as the country was ordered to mobilize. From the time Soviet troops first crossed the frontier they felt the strength and dourness of Dutch resistance and replied with a savagery far exceeding what was still remembered in Holland from the Germans. It was fortunate indeed for the Dutch that this occupation by a wartime enemy of a very different sort lasted only a few weeks.

Britain, once again free from invasion and occupation by an enemy, had its own problems. An account is given in Chapter 4, ‘Awakening Response in the West’, and in Appendices 1 and 4, of the growing awareness, in the seven years before the outbreak of war, of the reality of the danger to the Western Alliance from the
USSR
. of the dangerously weak state into which the defences of the United Kingdom had been allowed to fall, and of the country’s exposed position as the bridgehead for US reinforcement. In the matter of civil defence, growing pressure from the public, spearheaded in the first instance by unofficial bodies such as the National Emergency Volunteers (see Appendix 4), finally compelled a reluctant government to take the threat more seriously. Government spending on civil defence (at Ł2 million per annum in 1978, just one-twentieth of what had been allocated ten years earlier) was sharply increased, until by 1983 it was approaching the 1968 figure. The legislation on army reserves (see Appendix 1), introduced as a result of constant pressure from Chief Constables on the Home Office, provided for the re-establishment of what was known as
TAVR
II—a part of the Territorial and Auxiliary Volunteer Reserve for particular relevance in the management of a national emergency—in a general increase in reserve forces. Further legislation included, in 1983, a Civil Protection (Emergencies) Act, which rationalized and extended emergency planning at all levels and introduced a phased system of alerts. A national civil defence exercise held in August 1984 led to a widespread improvement in procedures and brought out the clear lesson—borne out a year later—that law and order would provide the acutest problems.

It is now perfectly clear that but for these reforms Great Britain would have fallen into near-chaos under Soviet air attack. And no rocket attack was experienced for more than a fortnight. Until the Soviet Union was prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons as a deliberate act of policy, and accept the consequences, it would be taking a wholly irrational risk to allow ballistic missiles to appear on Western tracking screens. Conventional high explosive and incendiary bombing, mixed with chemicals, delivered from manned aircraft using stand-off methods, caused damage enough.

Evacuation of children, food and petrol rationing, the activation of emergency services, the decentralization of administration—all worked smoothly enough. It was the exodus from the towns, particularly from the Midlands and the north towards the west and south, that did most to tax the authorities, even with their new-found powers and resources. It was in movement, too, that there occurred the ugliest scenes of mob violence, rioting and looting.

Lawlessness was particularly in evidence in the towns. Houses left untenanted were an open invitation to burglary. Mugging in the streets, even in broad daylight, was common. Air raids offered particularly favourable opportunities for crime, though it was claimed by some that you were safer on the streets during an alert than after it. The ‘•all-clear’ brought the muggers out again.

It cannot truthfully be said that Britain was ever near collapse as an ordered society, though life in it in those few weeks was difficult for many, and dangerous for some, while death and destruction were widespread. Much went on as before. The weather was good. In the country the hay was in, the harvest promising. Industry, the railways, coal mining, went on much as before, though North Sea gas was cut off and little oil flowed. Movement was difficult but rationing hurt very few. Food distribution worked well enough, even under the stresses of refugee movement. Cricket was played. People swam, sailed and fished. There was even some racing. The school holidays were not yet over, though when they were very many schools would not reopen in the same place. People still tended to live a large part of their lives with, and through, television—perhaps even more so than before. Indeed, since television was an aspect of life which, in wartime, at once assumed an enormously enhanced importance, the part it played in the events of August 1985 deserves closer examination.

The war brought immediate censorship to the television screens in Western Europe and the United States. In the years preceding the outbreak of fighting there had been considerable debate as to how far it would be wise to adopt open censorship, with the risk of breaking public trust in the television news, long established as the main source of news. The realities of the war swept those doubts aside. One of the most cogent arguments for censorship in the Second World War—the need to deny the enemy information which would be of value to him—was no longer valid. Soviet space satellites, with the detailed information they could afford, provided an immediate and much more accurate picture of what was happening than could be gleaned from the television screen. Had fear of informing the enemy been the only factor, risks could have been taken. But the risk which no government and no military leader in the West could accept was that of potential damage to civilian morale if the high and horrible cost in human suffering of this war were to be projected night after night into the homes of the public. This was a more important factor in the United States than in Britain and on the Continent, where the pattern of viewing had been much disrupted by the air attacks, which drove people away from their sitting rooms and into cellars and shelters into which they could not usually move their televisions. Here the radio reasserted itself as the main source both of news and of guidance from the authorities. But on the Continent, too, over wide areas, particularly outside the main cities, life was able to continue nonetheless with a considerable degree of normality, and the television screen remained the centre of attention. So the authorities from the outset adopted a policy of allowing the television bodies to cover the war as freely as they could whilst insisting on a rigid censorship of the material which emerged. In practice, this did not prove too difficult a task, for the highly mechanized, rapid, highly scientific nature of the fighting, together with the paralysing effect of chemical warfare on all but those equipped to deal with it, limited drastically the coverage which was possible. Battle losses among television cameramen, even in the comparatively short time the fighting lasted, were high.

This policy of strict censorship prevailed throughout the three weeks of the fighting in Europe. Whether it could have lasted in such a rigid form if the conflict had gone on much longer is another matter. There were already signs of restiveness by the third week. In Britain the policy received its most severe test when Birmingham was destroyed. For the first twenty-four hours after the attack the authorities declared a complete ban on all pictures from the scene—pictures which were in any event difficult to secure. Coverage was concentrated on the size of the rescue operation, on scenes of fire brigades and rescue squads moving into the area, and on the damage on the periphery. But such was the wave of rumour and alarm which spread throughout the country that the government rapidly reversed this decision, and decided that only the truth would meet the situation. It therefore allowed the full story to be told, encouraged no doubt by the knowledge that the counter-blow on Minsk had already done much to loosen the links between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites.

The propaganda war, which was to a large extent a television war, was not, however, fought by the combatants for the minds of their own peoples only. It was also a war to influence the minds of the enemy, and the minds of the neutrals—and of their allies. Both sides saw immediately that the most effective propaganda they could make use of would be to emphasise the sufferings of their troops, giving the widest possible exposure to those scenes of casualties and damage which were being so carefully censored out. Within Germany the communist bloc were able to make immediate use of the East German and Czechoslovakian wavebands, already readily view-able within Western Europe, to disseminate such pictures. They reinforced this, particularly in the case of Britain, by disseminating material from satellites, utilizing for this purpose the fourth television channel which existed on most British sets, and which had by 1985 still not been used for entertainment. It should be added here that the main reason for this had, ironically, been the decision to divert into improved defence expenditure the resources which might otherwise have gone to financing further television. Though the British authorities were able to jam this wavelength, the Soviet Union were still able to infiltrate a considerable volume of material aimed at damaging the morale of Western audiences. It was almost all of terrible casualties, shown in ciose-up, of shocked and exhausted prisoners, of mile upon mile of damaged tanks, smashed vehicles and the wreckage of every kind of equipment. Many sequences showed shocked and wounded Allied prisoners pleading, whether genuinely or with false voices dubbed over, for peace.

The Allied response was on similar lines. From West German transmitters a steady volume of comparable material was directed at East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To begin with little effort was made to hit at the morale of the Russians themselves.’The Allies rightly appreciated that if the crack was to come, it would be within the satellite states. Two ‘•black’ propaganda television stations, operating from the Federal Republic, one beamed into Czechoslovakia and one into East Germany, began broadcasting within hours of the outbreak of war. These had been skillfully prepared, with the aid of exiled broadcasters from those countries, to resemble closely the official communist stations. They presented themselves as being Czechoslovak Television and
GDR
Television, operating on a separate wavelength because of damage to transmitters on the main wavelength. They gave a service identical in pattern to the official service, but with the news, and in particular the newsfilm, selected to present the communist position in the worst possible light. Since the main stations were still transmitting, the device was readily detected, but investigations after the war showed that these stations had commanded a surprisingly high audience, due at least in part to the high quality of their transmissions. One feature was their use of recordings of popular serials and popular music programmes which ran on the official Eastern channels, which had been pirated off the air by agencies of the Federal Republic in advance, ready for re-use.

The parallel propaganda battle for the minds of people outside Europe and the United States was also fought on radio and television. Three areas were of outstanding importance: Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Both the Warsaw Pact and the Allied powers sought from the outset to use television to prove one central point to the people of these areas—that their side was winning. There was no time to go into the question of the rights and wrongs of the struggle. What was going to influence the attitudes of Africa and the Middle East and Far East was above all which side they thought was going to win. Soviet propaganda concentrated on constant radio reports of the success of their attacks, supported by television news pictures of their forces in action—and winning. Allied propaganda was much the same, except that the message they had to convey was not one of victorious advances but of successful resistance. Every day that the Russians were held away from the Rhine was a propaganda gain of the utmost value, for it dented the image of Soviet invincibility.

In this propaganda struggle the Allies were possessed from the outset of superior resources, both technical and human. The addiction of the peoples of Western Europe and America to television in the prewar years now proved a boon. It had given Western Europe, and above all Britain and the United States, an efficient worldwide infrastructure for the swift transmission of television pictures, via satellite, all over the globe. The structure designed to meet the world’s hunger for pictures of European football, and news, was ideal for international propaganda. Every day, in peacetime, international newsfilm agencies, together with Eurovision and the other international television bodies, had been transmitting, chiefly from centres in London, New York, San Francisco and Madrid, a steady stream of programme material. Thousands of technicians were trained for this work and accustomed to doing it. The Allies could draw, therefore, on the hundreds of television camera teams, almost all now equipped with lightweight, highly portable
ENG
cameras, who worked for the many television stations of the West. When the fighting broke out the American networks operated from their relatively secure base in the United States as a united body, pouring out to the rest of the world a flood of material gathered by the camera teams of all the Allied countries.