What had been done within the Atlantic Alliance was not enough to prevent war. Brought to the edge of it by miscalculation and mischance, with time not on their side, the Russians were not held back from the invasion of Europe by the clear certainty that an invasion would fail. On the contrary, the opening, even if less attractive than before, still looked too good to miss, especially as it might not come again. What the Western Allies had just managed to do, through a new surge of confidence and resolve in some of them at least, was enough to soften the blow when it came, to prevent the swift military resolution on which Soviet Russia depended, to give time and opportunity for the use of some at least of the huge resources disposed of in the West, and eventually to spark off the explosions in subject nations which were in the end to bring the Soviet Union down.
At midday on 15 August, as the units of the new US corps, fully equipped and ready for action, were hurrying under formidable defensive air cover by road and rail through France, while on the far side of the Atlantic further shipping was being marshalled into convoys to bring across the equipment for another, the welcome news reached AFCENT that the NORTHAG offensive had got off well and was making progress.
For the first time Allied ground forces were operating under conditions of local air superiority. A formidable slice of 4 ATAF’s air reserves had been allotted by COMAAFCE to 2 ATAF. CENTAG and SOUTHAG were supported only by what was left of 4 ATAF, with the remnants of 5 ATAF and the French Tactical Air Force, the latter long released from the French government’s insistence that it operate only in support of troops under French command. For the time being, while the main counter-offensive battle was opened in the north, this was enough in the south. SOUTHAG’s turn would come.
Bremen airfield had been seized by US airborne troops and some, if not many, air-portable units had been flown in, under anti-air defences that were now proving more and more effective. The main attack, with three divisions up and two more to follow, moving across the Lippe just before first light, with elaborate deception measures to indicate an attack further west, was very greatly helped by the emergence of well-equipped and carefully hidden stay-behind groups of German
Useful and heartening though the Allied riposte might be, it could by no stretch of the imagination be seen as the victory over the invading forces of the Warsaw Pact which was immediately announced, to the great discomfort of Allied chiefs of staff, by the Western press and TV networks worldwide, above all in the United States. Little else had changed. In Norway, for example, AFNORTH, without much in the way of air support except what could be provided from the United Kingdom, and, with great difficulty, from carriers operating north of the Faroes, was still containing and harassing the Soviet advance in the exceedingly difficult terrain of Troms and Nordland. From the Skagerrak to the Hook of Holland the coast, and the hinterland to some depth, was in occupation by Pact forces under Polish command. Denmark had been overrun more than a week ago. Hamburg had been declared an open city, a declaration which the Russians had ignored. It was being left alone all the same, bypassed for attention later. The Berlin garrison, surrounded by troops from divisions now withdrawn out of the fighting in the FRG, was being almost contemptuously left alone. From the Baltic and Carpathian Military Districts of the USSR some twenty divisions were on the move to come in, as the next echelon, behind those that had followed up, out of Byelorussia, the first incursion from the GSFG.
Further south little Austria had been brutally brushed aside. Two or three brigades of good mountain troops were fighting on with the French and Germans in Bavaria, and older folk in Graz were remembering again how things had been in an occupation by Russian soldiers once before. AFSOUTH, with its regional headquarters no longer in Italy but in Spain, had fallen apart. Soviet domination of the Italian peninsula, if unobtrusive, was complete. In Yugoslavia the civil war dragged on, with US marines, once in the eye of the storm before it became a hurricane, now virtually cut off in Slovenia and tenuously supplied by air. Greece was manning her frontier with Bulgaria, alongside Turkey-in-Europe. Asiatic Turkey was under some Soviet pressure from the north, though not yet an object of major attack. The Soviet Black Sea fleet had moved through the Straits already. That, for the USSR, was enough for the present in south-east Europe.
