1983: The World at the Brink — Taylor Downing

Cover of 1983


1983: The World at the Brink
Taylor Downing
391 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

If there ever was a movie that embodied the fears about nuclear war I had living through the early eighties, just old enough to understand the concept, it has to be Threads. I turned nine that year, just old enough to start to comprehend what nuclear war would be like. We had an insane cowboy in the White House who talked about a winneable nuclear war and a series of rapidly decomposing, extremely paranoid leaders in the Kremlin. One small mistake and the world would’ve ended. And while I didn’t learn about Threads long after the cold War had ended, I really didn’t need it to have nightmares. Any mention of anything nuclear on the news was enough to set them off. It didn’t help either that pop culture at that point was saturated with nuclear war imagery.

Fortunately, Threads was never broadcast in the Netherlands at that time, or I would’ve never been able to sleep ever again. Learning about it in a BBC retrospective somewhere around the turn of the millennium was traumatising enough already for the nightmares to return. That shot of the mushroom cloud going up over Sheffield with the old lady in the foreground pissing herself. That was the sort of fear and anxiety, that feeling of helplessness I grew up with in the eighties, in a country where you couldn’t pretend that you could have cool adventures fighting mutants afterwards. No, you either be dead or wishing you were. Being a sensitive kid I didn’t need to see nuclear war movies to imagine how horrible it would be. Which is why I won’t be celebrating Threads day by finally watching it.

Threads: Thursday May 26th 08:00

No, I prefer to feed my nightmares through print, like with Nigel Calder’s Nuclear Nightmares which I reread a couple of years ago. As with so many people my age I know, I can’t help but occasionally pick at that scab. Especially as I got older and learned more about the realities behind my nightmares, I can’t help but want to learn more about it, to confirm my fears weren’t unfounded. 1983: The World at the Brink is very good at doing exactly that. It not only confirmed that my childhood nuclear war paranoia was justified, it showed things were so much worse than I could’ve ever imagined back then. 1983 may very well have been the most dangerous year of the entire Cold War.

The way Taylor Downing sets about showing why this is the case is by providing a chronological overview of the year and its crisises, until about two-thirds into the book we hit the ultimate crisis point, the moment civilisation could’ve ended if things had gone even slightly differently. He starts with a short explanation of the context in which these incidents took place. How the detente of the seventies had ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan, gun-ho to take on the Evil Empire, in 1980. That with the death of Brezhnev in 1982, the head of the KGB, Andropov would be made the leader of the USSR,a man made paranoid by the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which he played a role in suppressing. Here there was a leader of the Free West who started talking about a winnable nuclear war opposite a Soviet leader deadly paranoid about attacks on his ‘socialist paradise’. Not a good combination in a time when tensions were already rising due to Afghanistan.

In 1981, while still head of the KGB, Andropov had already launched Operation RYAN, an intelligence programme aimed at determining whether the US and NATO were preparing for a nuclear first strike. By 1983 this operation was intensified as the US was starting to deploy cruise missile and Pershing II nuclear missiles to Europe as part of Reagan’s general re-armament plans. While RYAN was intended as a safety measure, its real effect was to feed Andropov’s paranoia, making him increasingly concerned that the US was planning a first strike. Reagan meanwhile, cheerfully unaware of this, was talking up plans to create a missile defence system against nuclear attacks, making America invulnerable. Regardless of the technical merits of Star Wars, even thinking about such a defence against nuclear attack was threatening the status quo of mutually assured destruction. Peace was being maintained because both sides could destroy the other completely, regardless of who shot first. There was no advantage in starting a nuclear war as long as everybody died in it. But if an increasing technological advance meant the US could defend itself, or could unleash such a devastating first strike that retaliation was impossible, that put the USSR in a dilemma. If the US was preparing a strike, the Soviets should strike immediately before the strike had even launched, or risk being caught off guard. And that was much more ripe for error than if you wait until the missiles have actually launched.

And then, in September 1983, a Korean airliner blundered into Soviet airspace, was mistaken for an American military spy plane and through a series of tragic errors, shut down with all passengers and crew killed. That immediately shut down any tentative prospect of unfreezing the Cold War. It strengthened Reagan’s opinion about the USSR being an evil empire, while it also fed Andropov’s paranoia about the country’s vulnerabilities, that an airliner had been allowed to enter sensitive airspace unchallenged. All this set the stage for Able Archer, a NATO military exercise, which simulated a Soviet invasion of West Germany culminating in a NATO nuclear strike to stop the advance. A so-called command post exercise, in which the various military headquarters were involved but not so much soldiers out in the field, the USSR was convinced it would be cover for a real first strike against it. It had take measures to reduce its vulnerability, by putting its nuclear forces on high alert, by making the preparations for a strike so that if it was necessary it could be done almost immediately. All that was needed was for Andropov to become convinced America was about to strike and give the order to strike first. And the moment that would happen came increasingly close as the NATO exercise grew in intensity.

At this point in the book Downing had thrown me deep into that paranoid mindset; my relief when the crisis passed was palpable, even knowing full well nuclear war hadn’t happened in November 1983. The rest of 1983: The World at the Brink is more cheerful, describing how both leaders walk themselves back from the abyss. How with the deaths of first Andropov and then his successor Chernenko the way was freed up for Gorbachev, a true reformer who managed to build a personal bond with Reagan, who set in motion the events that would lead to the end of the Cold War as well as the Soviet Union. Even more than three decades onwards, it’s still a miracle such a vast and powerful empire could be dissolved mostly peacefully, that we didn’t all die in nuclear shock waves in November 1983.

If you’re my generation, this book then is the confirmation of all the old bad dreams you had back then. If you’re too young to have lived through it yourself, a good look back a period where all this was normal.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II — Michael Green

Cover of American Tanks & AFVs of World War II


American Tanks & AFVs of World War II
Michael Green
376 pages including notes & index
published in 2014

It’s a fact of life that interest in World War II armour tends to focus on Nazi Germany, with Soviet vehicles perhaps a distant second. Understandable, considering how many interesting and downright strange types made it into production or had at least a prototype created. It’s always tempting to think about what if those potential wunderwaffen had made it into service, whereas the realities of western allied armour are always much more mundane. At least the French and to a lesser extend, the British, had some cool but impractical dead ends available in the early war, but American armour was just relentlessly pragmatic. the answer to any problem encountered seemed to be let’s build more Shermans, rather than creating some new exotic prototype.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II does nothing to disabuse you of those preconceptions. Yes, there are some what ifs to be found, but in case after case what Michael Green documents here is the ruthless pragmaticism of the US army during world War II. It’s not just that the whole design and procurement process was much more centralised and efficient than that of Nazi Germany — but it certainly helped that there was no Hitler type mucking about on the US side. It’s also that the first instinct was always to look for solutions through modifying existing vehicles, rather than creating new ones. A determination not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or even good enough. If it worked, why replace it just because there was a better option? That’s the attitude that comes across reading this book.

After a short introduction, American Tanks & AFVs of World War II starts with the development of medium tanks between the wars, culminating in the M3, the first major US tank of World War II, which saw action in North Africa and Italy, as well as the Pacific. This is followed by a long chapter on the development of the ultimate American medium tank, the M4 or Sherman. The Sherman as a tank had always been a bit confusing to me, because its long production and gradual evolution meant there were a confusing number of subvariants and it isn’t always easy to distinguish them. Therefore I appreciate Michael Green’s efforts here to make sense of them all. With the focus on World War II it’s not an entirely complete story of course, as there were numerous post-war variants as well. Not to mention British variants like the infamous Firefly.

The chapters on light and heavy tanks are together only slightly longer than the M4 chapter, which shows its importance. The heavy tank was never that much of a priority to the US army in the war; there never was an equivalent of the Tiger. The 75 or 76 mm armed Sherman was deemed good enough. When there was a demand for a more heavier armoured tank therefore, the Sherman was up-armoured rather than a new tank created. The only tank taken into service that could be classified as heavy would be the M26 Pershing, which only arrived very late in the war. On the light tank front, things were somewhat different. The M3 and M5 series were excellent scout vehicles much used by both the US and the British/Commonwealth, while the M24 was the ultimate WWII light tank, armed with a similar 75mm gun to the Sherman. Again it’s telling that the 37mm armed M3/M5s were kept in service for so long despite their main armament being obsolete almost from their introduction. Their role wasn’t to fight other tanks and the US was never tempted to upgun them just because they could.

Tank destroyers were an important part of US army doctrine, as they were intended to fight enemy tanks rather than leaving it to the tanks themselves. This used to be the tasks of towed anti-tank guns before the war, but the German blitzkrieg put paid to the notion that towed guns could suffice. The first generation of tank destroyers mated existing, often obsolete guns with wheeled vehicles or half tracks. There was e.g. the M3 half track with a World War I vintage 75mm gun that was used in North Africa and Sicily. With the limitations of this sort of design becoming obvious, the next step was to create tank destroyers from existing medium tanks. The M10, M18 and M36 all used the M4 chassis with new turrents and different guns: a 3 inch, 75mm and 90mm respectively as demands for more fire power increased.

The remaining chapters detail the more niche armoured vehicles used in World War II: armoured cars and half tracks, self propelled artillery and tracked landing vehicles. The ruthless pragmatism of the US army really shows through well in these first two categories, with only a very limited number of different armoured cars and half tracks ever taken into series production. The first especially, with only a few types of light armoured cars taken into service and no heavy ones, unlike other armies. With self propelled artillery, there was the same sort of trajectory as with tank destroyers: first using wheeled vehicles before moving on to using the M3 and M4 tank chassis. Tracked landing vehicles were of course mostly used in the Pacific, but also by some of the river crossings in North West Europe late in the war. Again, any improvement here was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, with heavier armament added as needed.

If you want a one shot overview of American tank and armoured vehicle development during World War II, this is an excellent introduction. Plenty of excellent photos and illustrations too help tell the story. Recommended.

The Key to the Bulge — Stephen M. Ruseicki

Cover of Snow & Steel


The Key to the Bulge: The Battle for Losheimergraben
Stephen M. Ruseicki
195 pages including notes
published in 1996

A visit to the Bastogne War Museum when I was on a holiday in the Ardennes last October got me interested in the Battle of the Bulge again, as did the series WW2TV did on the campaign in December. Their interview with Peter Caddick-Adams on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know led me to read his excellent book on the campaign as a whole. Which in turn whet my appetite for more on the individual battles within the Ardennes Campaign. Military history like all history is fractal after all. You can get a broad overview but if you zoom in you get a lot more detail, new insights. Which is where this book comes in. With Snow and Steel I got the broad strokes of the Ardennes Campaign, with this I got an overview of one of the most important of the early battles in it, one that could be argued determined the outcome of the entire Ardennes Offensive…

That battle was the battle for Losheimergraben, then, as now, a small border crossing between Belgium and Germany, too small even to call a village. In December 1944 this was the front line, the furthest point reached by the great Allied breakout from Normandy earlier that year. Since then the front line in the Ardennes had been largely static; the real fighting continued further up north, in the Netherlands and around Aachen. The Ardennes itself was quiet, an ideal sector to introduces green troops to life at the front and blood them before they got thrown into real battle. Losheimergraben and neighbouring places like Lanzerath were held by such troops, the 394th Infantry Regiment of the 99th infantry Division. It was these troops that would hold out for thirty-six hours against the Sixth Panzer Army starting on the 16th of December, denying it the quick victory it needed to comply to its already impossible schedule.

Hitler’s original idea behind the Ardennes Offensive was to repeat the success of May 1940, when Germany’s panzers broke through the “impenetrable” Ardennes and split the Allied forces in two, ultimately sealing the fate of France and driving the British from the continent. This time his strategic aim was the same, but aimed at seizing Antwerp, denying the Allies its use and splitting up the British and American forces. There are however relatively few passages through these mountains that are usable by armour, of which the so-called Losheim Gap, also used in 1940, is one. Grabbing Losheimergraben, where an east-west road from Germany into Belgium intersects the main north-south road in the Ardennes, was to be the first step in the German drive through this gap. From there the goal was to drive the panzers forward into Bullingen, to Malmedy and beyond to cross the Meuse. Once the Meuse crossings had been made the panzer armies could drive onto Antwerp and victory. But it all depended on seizing those border crossings and seizing them quickly and that would be a job for the infantry.

The American defenses in this crucial sector, as they were all across the Ardennes, were light. Because it was regarded as a quiet sector, not only was it considered an excellent sector to bleed green troops in, it also meant fewer troops were stationed there in the first place. Which meant individual divisions had to defend larger pieces of the front line than was recommended. The 99th Infantry Division therefore had little in the way of reserves, needing all three of its regiments to remain in line to cover the entirety of what it was responsible for. Worse, it was stationed on the border with another army corps, with Lanzerath and the Losheim Gap right on the border, barely covered by any American soldiers. This is the stage on which those initial German attacks happened on the 16th of December. Yet despite being outnumbered and surprised, the inexperienced men of the 394th regiment of the 99th division held out for more than a day against the German onslaught. How was this possible?

As Ruseicki describes it, it’s clear the tenacity and sheer dogged will of these American soldiers to resist played a big role. they may have been green, but they were well trained, their morale was good and they weren’t going to just roll over. Making good use of their defences they held back the enemy as long as they could before withdrawing in good order to a new defensive line. Ultimately they were never broken and the Germans never quite managed to break through, the offensive stalled almost from the start. Looking at it from the German side, it’s clear that they had problems even had their opponents been a pushover. The obsession to keep the offensive a secret meant little preparation and with no reconnaissance allowed, they had no idea what they were walking into. Having soldiers that on the whole turned out to be just as green as the Americans, but far less well trained, didn’t help either. If reading this you are reminded of how Russia’s currently bungling its war on Ukraine, you’re not the only one…

This was an interesting look at one of the opening battles of the Ardennes Offensive. Ruseicki describes the action well without being overtly dramatic. A good example, well explained, of how small scale battles can impact a wider offensive.

Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Cover of Snow & Steel


Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.

It’s Snow & Steel‘s ambition to tell the entire story of the Battle of the Bulge, knowing full well it’s impossible to do so. As the author himself has admitted, the air war for example is barely covered in this book. Similarly, some important battles are barely touched upon, some phases of the campaign less exhaustively treated than others. What Snow & Steel instead provide is as good as possible an overview of the campaign as a whole, set in context of both what gave birth to it and how it in turn impacted the rest of the war. Not only that, Caddick-Adams also looks at its impact after the war, on the people that fought in it but also those who sought to learn from its lessons. He himself has a background in the (Cold War) UK military and knows from first-hand experience how the Ardennes Offensive was studied to prepare for the expected Soviet attack on West Germany.

The first third of the book therefore is all about establishing the context in which the offensive took place, why it was planned and how it was planned. The conventional idea about the Ardennes Offensive is that Hitler thought it up on September 16th, when he announced it to the commanders who would lead the operation. As Caddick-Adams shows though, Hitler had from almost the start of the fighting in Normandy aimed for a decisive counterattack against the Anglo-American forces landed there, there had been attempts to do so but ultimately it wasn’t until the Germans had been driven out of France and Belgium that there was an opportunity to do so. Once the situation had stabilised, both the target of Antwerp as the Ardennes as the sector to attack through made sense. Antwerp was the closest harbour to the front the Allies had, only recently opened. Without it, supplies needed to come all the way from Normandy and Bretagne again and it was this logistic strain that had stopped Allied progress in the first place. Doing it through the Ardennes, repeating the success of May 1940 made sense both psychological as military. It was a quiet sector, undermanned and with a number of green divisions just arrived in theatre. If it could be done by surprise and if it could count on the absence of Allied air support, the operation had a chance of succeeding, at least in its initial goal, crossing the Meuse.

Not that many of the actual commanders believed that was possible, let alone reaching Antwerp, but this was 1944 and Hitler was in no mood for dissent after having almost been killed in a Wehrmacht plot. A more realistic plan would’ve been to try and encircle the American troops in the Ardennes and at the border with Germany, to try and destroy 15-20 divisions that way to buy time to prepare the defence of Germany, but that was rejected. To be fair, such a success wouldn’t have mattered much, only postponed the inevitable. Only if Hitler’s plan succeeded and had the effect of tearing apart the western allies would Germany have a chance at a negotiated peace. As Caddick-Adams shows, this was an idle hope. Both the goal and the effects it would have were unrealistic. Even getting to the Meuse, basically the start line for the drive to Antwerp would require a miracle, everything going to plan and the Allied responding exactly like Hitler wanted them to. But it didn’t and they didn’t and by the end of the first day it was already clear that it would not work.

Ironically it might have been the paranoid security measures Hitler insisted on to keep the operation a secret that both made it such a surprise to the Allies and led to its ultimate failure. For various reasons, the usual intelligence the Allies relied upon were already less effective now the enemy was in its homeland. No need for encrypted radio broadcasts if you can use your secure telephone lines for example. At the same time, the actual participants in the operation were kept in the dark as long as possible. Initially only the highest commanders of the offensive were in the loop, while the average soldier was only informed just before the offensive started. There was little opportunity therefore for anybody to spill the secret, but it also meant the troops were ill prepared for the actual fight. Worse, with Hitler forbidding reconnaissance efforts or anything that could give away the game, the Germans were also much less informed about the Allied positions and strengths than you would’ve wanted to be.

When it comes to the actual battle, it becomes clear almost from the start that it would fail. Initial resistance is much harder than the Germans realised and the highly optimistic targets for the first day are reached almost nowhere. Worse, the Allied response is much quicker than Hitler had anticipated. Much of the credit for that Caddick-Adams gives to Eisenhouwer, who acted decisively from day one to get reinforcements to the front and to get the shoulders of the offensive stabilised in order to counter attack. With the failure to get through the Ardennes as quickly as was needed to be able to cross the Meuse and start the true offensive, the fighting became a war of attrition which the Germans would always lose. Ultimately it set the Allies’ plans for the invasion of Germany back a couple of months, but in return many of the elite troops and weapons they would’ve faced otherwise had already been destroyed in the Bulge.

I started reading this book because I went on holiday to the Ardennes with my family, visiting the Bastogne War Museum there, but also because of the excellent series of Battle of the Bulge programmes the Youtube channel WW2TV ran in early December. If you want to get a taste of Peter Caddick-Adams writing, then watch the presentation he did for that channel on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know. I really like the methological way Caddick-Adams sets out his vision on the Offensive and why it was doomed to failure in this book and if you want a one volume overview of the campaign this is the one to get. I would however recommend that you keep both Wikipedia and Google Maps handy to look up things, because it can be a bit confusing at times. Viewing the battlefields on Google Maps gives a better grasps at the geography and flow of the battles, while Wikipedia is handy to look up some of the less explained details.

Nuclear Nightmares — Nigel Calder

Cover of Nuclear Nightmares


Nuclear Nightmares: an Investigation into Possible Wars
Nigel Calder
168 pages including index
published in 1979

To distract myself from the current state of the covid-19 ravaged world, I read this cheery little treatise on the machinery for nuclear war. Many many years ago, sometime in the early eighties, I bought the Dutch edition for a guilder at a church fair. And boy was it worth it: I had nightmares for years. Not that you needed much to have nuclear nightmares in the early eighties; if you ever wonder why late Gen-Xers and early millennials are so cynical, it’s because we grew up with the idea that the nuclear holocaust could happen every minute just because some world leader was a bit too gung ho. Or some seemingly small mistake makes the Soviets think an American missile barage is on its way and this time there isn’t a junior officer brave enough to wait for confirmation before he launches a counterstrike…

But that is not the nightmare that Nigel Calder sketches in this book. His is a technocratic world, a world of rational men tending carefully balanced machinery designed to deliver megadeath on the enemy. Men who do not want to murder millions of people, but who will do so if and when it is asked of them. A world full of acronym littered dry, bureaucratic language that conceals the existentialist horror at the heart of it. An orderly world that calmly makes plan to destory or cripple the enemy’s ability to wage nuclear war, that worries about the vulnerability of MIRVED Minutemen III and whether they were safe enough and good enough to hit back at the Soviets after a first strike. Can we depend on the survivability of our systesm to give our leaders time enough to think about whether they want to strike back?

And then no two years later you got a fake cowboy in the White House talking about the Evil Empire, mentally disintegrating on the job and joking on live tv that the bombs will drop in five minutes. All while promoting implausible future wonderwaffen that would make America safe from nuclear attack forever.

And on the other side, a succesion of half dead paranoid survivors of Stalin convinced the west could and would attack them any minute. For all the Western hawks worrying about Soviet plans for world domination, more concerned with Dmitri in Leningrad finally getting a fridge and colour television, but worried that the imperialistic west was plotting to abuse a period of weakness.

But even when Calder was writing his book, he was chronicling an illusion. The neat, orderly world of calm dispassionate technocrats making brilliant plans for the end of the world was fake. The reality is shown in a much more recent book, Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control. In reality, there were at least half a dozen incidents in which an American nuclear weapon would’ve detonated on American ground but for a bit of luck, where nuclear bombs are safeguarded with nothing more than a simple bicycle lock, where instead of intricate control mechanisms and the decision to launch made only at the highest level, any Italian soldier could’ve launched a leased American nuclear missile because there were no safeguards.

In hindsight, I’m not sure if Schlosser’s reality wouldn’t have frightened me more than Calder’s already terrifying portrait of a mechanism that could sleepwalk into nuclear war. What comforts me is that the actual military commanders involved at the time seemed to think a nuclear war would never happen, that the entire idea of the Cold War turning hot was a fantasy. Just read the reactions of senior Warsaw Pact commanders (PDF) to the idea of actually going to war and how likely that had been. If only I had know that in 1984, having nightmares every time the news was about arms limitation negotiations or tensions in Europe.

Of course, within a decade this whole system would be obsolete, that existential threat vanquished, the whole complex revealed to be irrelevant, as the people of Eastern Europe rose up and overthrow those seemingly invincible ‘socialist’ dictatorships. That seventies idea that the only choice the world had was between an uneasy detente between twho hostile systems or nuclear annihilation that sets the tone for Calder’s book was shown up to be false by the actions of ordinary people, completely powerless to do what it was built for, safeguard the existence of its masters’ world system.

The late 1970s were a strange time, the Soviet Union slowly rotting from the inside out while the lunatics of Team B –the people who thirty years later would bring you the War on Iraq — were busy screaming their heads off that America was doomed because the commies were so much better armed and so much more ruthless. All that was fake, but at the time we didn’t know better. All the clever clogs and military commentators really thought that the West was losing the Cold War, that our vulnerabilities meant a nuclear war was inevitable if we didn’t want to go Red. So much of eighties pop culture is steeped in that American paranoia, from Red Dawn to Pournelle’s CoDominion stories where detente was interstellar. Meanwhile here in Europe we grew up knowning our towns were just a megaton apart from each other and we were busy cataloging the likely nuclear targets near our home towns.

A real great time to grow up in. Never thought I’d make it to adulthood, but here we are.