The whole Allied position could hardly be called a winning one.
In the Central Region itself there were now deployed some forty divisions of the Warsaw Pact, fifteen of them tank divisions. Though some, at least, of this formidable order of battle had felt the effect of Allied air and missile attack, not more than half of it had yet been in action against an enemy on the ground. By any standard it was still three to four times as effective in firepower as the aggregate of Allied troops arrayed against it, and up to now the Warsaw Pact had held the whole initiative.
The Allied offensive of 15 August, nonetheless, was the key to changes of critical importance. In the first place it brought into being in the forward areas a new operational situation. The enemy had now to set about securing his flanks and rear before attempting to resume the full impetus of his forward movement, which it was only prudent for the time being to reduce. But there was more to it than this. The operational challenge to the Soviet High Command could, at least in the shorter term, be met and mastered. The political consequences of what was happening, in the chemistry of which the military action of 15 August can now be seen as a catalyst, could not.
The Soviet plan to bring about the military collapse of NATO’s Central Region, with the occupation of the Federal Republic and the disintegration of the Atlantic Alliance, before there was time to mobilize the West’s superior resources, or for the Western Allies to come to an agreement on the use of nuclear weapons, had already gone quite badly wrong. The intervention of the French, and the vigour with which it was pursued, had been as unwelcome as it had been unexpected. The improvements to NATO’s defensive posture in the previous few years, though not such as to put invasion by the Warsaw Pact right out of the question, had been sufficient to make it a good deal harder to bring off. The magnitude of the superiority in electronic technology enjoyed by the Allies, above all by the United States, and the adroitness of its application on the battlefield, had also come as an ugly shock. This, among other consequences, had prevented the suppression of anti-aircraft and anti-tank defences upon whose elimination Soviet tactical practice, both in the air and on the ground, so heavily relied. It had greatly hampered, by the severe degrading of communications which were sometimes reduced almost to nil, the operation of mobile formations expected to manoeuvre in depth.
The combined arms operations, moreover, upon which the battle-fighting method of the Red Army fundamentally depended, had been anything but a complete success. The Allies had operated, as it were, in the interstices of the method, separating components whose strength lay in their interdependence. The four main elements of the combined arms concept — manoeuvre, fire suppression, organic defence and combat support — had rarely been allowed to operate together in anything like the degree of harmony required.
For all these and other reasons the strategic programme had fallen so far behind that there was now a real danger of that massive Western build-up which it had been so important to forestall. Unaccountably, troop reinforcement over the US air bridge had continued and the Soviet Navy had been unable to prevent the safe arrival of heavy equipment by sea. More reinforcements were on the way. From the military point of view the question had to be asked: how much was there now to be gained by going on with a plan which had already failed?
The political consequences of incomplete military success in Germany were to be far-reaching. The military might of the Warsaw Pact had not been defeated. Far from it. What had happened, however, was almost as important as defeat. The Red Army had been shown not to be invincible. As awareness of its limitations began to spread so hope began to rise in places where, up to now, only an occasional display of brave and fruitless dissidence had relieved the grey uniformity of a hopeless resignation.
National revolt was still a long way off but the seeds of it were already being sown as, in spite of the strictest censorship, the news went swiftly round that all was not well with the offensive of the Warsaw Pact in Germany. From mid-August onwards growing partisan activity, with widespread sabotage and the disruption of rail communications through satellite countries, began to present an increasing problem on the lines of communication. This occurred first where, from the point of view of military supply, it mattered most — Poland. The same thing also began to happen in Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser extent in Hungary and Romania.
