The Third World War: August 1985 полностью

Losses in the air were well up to the levels that the peacetime analysts had forecast, but valuable fighters were more often lost on the ground than in the air. AEW aircraft paid the price for having to be far out on station and relatively unprotected, and tanker aircraft were sometimes lost for the same reason. A proportion of airfields were always unusable, but never so many that the defences were totally grounded. The problems of identification in a very active sky and of separation between missile and non-missile zones proved as difficult as exercises had always suggested that they would be. Inevitably some RAF attack aircraft returning from their Central Region targets fell victim to their own defences. The barrier patrol up to the north was there as a tourniquet around the Soviet long-range air forces seeking to threaten soft transport aircraft coming over the air bridge and the shipborne reinforcements coming across the sea. Some inevitably got through the net, but when this happened there was a second chance to intercept them in lower latitudes, though not always until after they had done damage to sea and air supplies.

As one instance, on 6 August two Backfire bombers armed with a massive battery of air-to-air missiles got loose in the procession of air transports wallowing across the Atlantic at 550 miles an hour. It was easy shooting. They knocked down three C-5s and four 747s before withdrawing at high speed to the north. One of them fell to a Tornado trap on the way home.

A system of dispersing the transports when a raider was known to be loose had been introduced, but that time, for some reason, the codeword did not get through. The air bridge had been attacked before, but this was a black day with more than 2,000 men missing from a Central Army Group formation before they even knew they were in action. But for most of the time the losses were at least militarily acceptable.

After eight days it began to look as if the advantage might be lying slightly with the defences. It was impossible to draw up an exact balance sheet, but they were certainly taking a heavy toll of aircraft in the promising ratio of around four to one. All now depended on how long the Russians would keep up the pressure and how long the UK air defences could sustain their reaction.”

The following rather more personal account of events on a day in the second week of full hostilities is taken from an as yet unpublished narrative by the former Personal Staff Officer to AOC-in-C Strike Command. It illustrates the understanding commonly found between top commanders and those who work with them.

“Late in the afternoon of 12 August there was, for the first time, nothing on the radar plot. There had been plenty of action that day. The last incident had been when a force of ten-plus aircraft had turned back as soon as they ran into the Tornado CAP outside the Baltic. As many of No. 1 Group’s attack aircraft as they were likely to see again were now back from their early sorties over the Central Region, and it looked as if things might be quiet for an hour or so at least, while they, and no doubt the enemy, got ready for the next assault.

Sir John came up from the ground for a breather. His surface HQ had been hit several times but his operational control facilities were still working. It was a relief to walk on the grass in the Chiltern Hills on a summer afternoon. The day was clear but up in the sky a milky veil of what looked like cirrus cloud stretched from horizon to horizon. In fact it was the condensation trails of the great transatlantic airlift, each aircraft’s trails being churned up and added to by the one behind it as they ploughed on to their destination airfields.

In 1940 he had been at school in Kent, and he recalled how the masters and boys had had a grandstand view of the Battle of Britain from the playing fields — watching and cheering as Hurricanes chased Heinkels, and Spitfires fought Messerschmitts. The school-boys nowadays, and for that matter the whole civilian population, must be puzzled, he reflected, as they heard bombs explode and saw the grim result, with no action going on in the sky. They would know what that great milky way was because there had been so much about it on television. But would they understand that No. 11 Group, the same group as bore the brunt of the battle back in 1940, was once again fighting day and night for the survival of the country and the West — but this time way out of sight and far from the country’s shores? In due time, and if things came out right, he certainly hoped they would, for these were important matters to be understood by the public. If his reputation meant anything at the end of this war he would do his damnedest, he resolved, to see that the politicans did not forget a second time.