The Cold War: A MILITARY History (32 page)

NATO’S STRENGTHS

Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were dominated by a single navy whose resources, technical skill and sheer size were far greater than those of any of its allies. The essential difference, however, was that in NATO the United States allowed the allied navies to play a full role and to develop their fleets according to their traditions and abilities. This resulted in a great disparity in ship design and internal operating procedures, but also in a greater sense of mutual confidence and common purpose, as was particularly demonstrated by the standing naval forces.

fn1
Rickover (1900–86) was on the verge of retirement as a captain in 1946 when he joined the atomic-energy programme. He subsequently became chief of the Nuclear Power Division of the US navy. An extremely influential figure, with many friends in Congress, he eventually retired at the age of eighty-two, with the rank of four-star admiral.

fn2
A further eleven Ticonderoga-class cruisers and sixteen Los Angeles-class SSNs were completed after the end of the Cold War.

fn3
Albeit after the end of the Cold War, both STANAVFORMED and STANAVFORCHAN were deployed to the Adriatic during NATO operations after the break-up of Yugoslavia.

16

The Warsaw Pact Navies

UNLIKE THE USA
and the West, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact did not depend upon the sea, since they were all part of a contiguous land mass and thus operated on what strategists define as ‘interior lines’. During the Second World War the Axis powers suffered an inherent disadvantage because Germany and Italy were each separated by thousands of miles of Allied-dominated ocean from their only other important ally, Japan, and contact was confined to a few submarines and a diminishing number of merchant vessels. For the USSR in the Cold War, however, there were no overseas allies of any significance, and minor allies such as Cuba, Angola, Vietnam (post-1974) and Egypt (pre-1972) were countries whose loss in a war with NATO the Soviet General Staff could have viewed with total equanimity. There was therefore no inherent requirement for the Soviet Union to move troop reinforcements, military equipment, supplies or oil by sea and, as a result, the fleets of the two rival power blocs were intended to meet totally different requirements and developed in quite different ways.

THE SOVIET NAVY

Overview

During the Cold War the Soviet navy underwent a more fundamental change than any other navy in the world. The German, Italian and Japanese navies having been destroyed, the Soviet fleet emerged from the Second World War as a very poor third to the US and British navies in size and modernity, and, of possibly greater importance, with extremely limited experience of open-ocean (‘blue-water’) operations. During the Cold War, however, the Soviet navy rose to become second in size only to the US navy, while its designers produced ships, weapons and electronic systems which in most cases were at least the equal of those in the West, and in some cases
well
in advance. During this process it became a highly professional and competent naval force which was at home in any part of the world’s oceans.

Although it was considered a major threat to the West, however, the Soviet navy suffered from four inescapable problems. The most intractable of these was that its naval resources had, of necessity, to be split between four major fleets: the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific fleets. (A fifth, much smaller, fleet in the Caspian Sea was of little strategic significance.) This geographical separation was so great that there was no practical way in which these fleets could provide mutual support for each other. It was at least theoretically possible for ships to transfer between the Northern and Pacific fleets via the Arctic Ocean (in summer) or via the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, but whether either route would have been feasible in wartime was improbable, and a rerun of Admiral Zinovy P. Rozhdestvensky’s fatal voyage would have been a distinct possibility.
^fn1

A further problem was that each of the four major fleets could reach the open ocean only by passing through choke points which were not under Soviet control. Thus the Northern Fleet had to sail past the long Norwegian coastline and then transit through either the Greenland–Iceland, Iceland–Faroes or Faroes–UK gap to reach the Atlantic. The Baltic and Black Sea fleets had even tighter gaps to pass through: the former through the Danish Belts, the Kattegat and then the Skagerrak, and the latter through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. In the Far East the fleet, except for units based at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, had to pass through either the Korean, Tsugaru or La Pérouse straits to reach the Pacific.

In addition, most of the Soviet navy’s home ports were ice-bound for at least part of the winter, and the navy lacked the many forward bases that were available to the US navy, which could use harbour facilities around the world, except in Communist-controlled countries, while the Polaris/Poseidon-armed SSBNs were permanently forward-based in Scotland (Holy Loch), Spain (Rota) and Guam. Until late in the Cold War, this Soviet problem was exacerbated by the lack of under-way replenishment ships which could resupply task groups in distant waters with everything they needed.

Finally there was an intangible factor: the lack of recent naval combat experience. The Soviet navy had played only a very limited role in the
Second
World War; indeed, almost one-third of it – the Pacific Fleet – had played no part at all. The rest of the navy had fought a small-unit war in motor torpedo boats, submarine-chasers (small escorts), submarines and river flotillas. They had fought hard, certainly, and the submarine service had lost no less than eighty-nine boats in action (107 in all), but the overall results had been negligible. Thus, although the Soviet navy expanded very rapidly from the 1950s onwards, built many large and innovative warships, and became a true blue-water navy, it was all based on theory. On the other hand, the larger NATO navies, and in particular the Americans, British and French, had great experience in large-ship operations, the use of carriers, the employment of naval air power, the use of amphibious forces, the need for and the practice of damage control, and maintaining fleets in distant waters. Above all, they had experience of the command, control and communications needed to tie all this together.

Four external factors spurred the major developments in the Soviet navy. First was the deployment in the 1950s of US navy carrier groups operating aircraft such as the North American AJ-2 Savage, which could carry nuclear weapons to attack targets deep inside the Russian homeland. Second was the Soviet realization during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that they were unable to influence events in the Atlantic and Caribbean because they lacked blue-water surface forces. Third was the requirement to combat the threat posed by the US navy’s strategic missile submarines. The fourth and final factor was the perceived need to develop amphibious forces to deploy land forces on distant shores – something it had seen the US navy do on numerous occasions and was unable to match.

The Soviet navy’s operational priorities for surface warfare changed as the Cold War progressed and the threat from the USA and NATO was seen to alter. In the late 1940s the coastal navy was capable of little more than the defence of it bases, but the 1950s threat posed by bombers launched from US aircraft carriers forced the Soviet navy to become more of a blue-water navy. This US threat was supplemented by cruise-missile-armed submarines in the mid-1950s and then totally replaced by the submarines armed with Polaris SLBMs. Against all of these, however, the Soviet fleet’s tasks were still defensive in nature.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet navy, under the leadership of the redoubtable Admiral Gorshkov,
^fn2
espoused offensive strategies. Foremost was an oceanic role in a general war, which might, according to some Soviet naval strategists, even have been an entirely naval conflict, at least in the initial stages. In addition, a peacetime role was seen in protecting pro-Soviet revolutionary movements in the Third World.

Soviet naval strategy could not, however, be developed in isolation and was subject to intense criticism from the army, air force and strategic rocket force, all of which opposed plans to increase the resources allocated to the most junior of the Soviets’ services. The other influence was the Western response to Soviet naval expansion, which was to plan to take the offensive in war and to fight the naval battle as close to Soviet shores as possible. It thus became noticeable that, whereas Soviet naval exercises in the 1970s and early 1980s were essentially aggressive in nature, by the middle and late 1980s they were once again defensive in character.

Soviet Naval Activity

In the immediate post-war years the only naval units of even marginal significance were three battleships: a Russian vessel dating back to tsarist times and two British ships of First World War vintage, which had been lent to the USSR during the war. One of the latter was returned to the UK in 1949, having been replaced by the ex-Italian
Giulio Cesare
, which the Soviets renamed
Novorossiysk
.
^fn3
There were also some fifteen cruisers – a mixture of elderly Soviet designs, nine modern Soviet-built ships, a US ship lent during the war (and returned in 1949), and two former Axis cruisers, one ex-German, the other ex-Italian. There was also a force of some eighty destroyers, also of varying vintages and origins.

During the 1940s and 1950s these Soviet warships were rarely seen on the high seas, apart from a limited number of transfers between the Northern and Baltic fleets, which tended to be conducted with great rapidity. The only exception was a series of international visits, mainly by the impressive Sverdlov-class cruisers, which were paid to countries such as Sweden and the UK. The navy suffered a major setback in 1955 when the battleship
Novorossiysk
was sunk while at anchor in the Black Sea by a Second World War German ground mine, an event which led to the sacking of the commander-in-chief, Admiral N. M. Kuznetzov; he was replaced by Admiral Gorshkov.

In the early 1960s, however, individual Soviet units began to be seen more frequently in foreign waters, as did ever-increasing numbers of ‘intelligence collectors’, laden with electronic-warfare equipment. These ships, generally known by their NATO designation as ‘AGIs’, monitored US and NATO exercises and ship movements. The original AGIs were converted trawlers and salvage tugs, but, as the Cold War progressed and the Soviet navy became increasingly sophisticated, larger and more specialized ships were built, culminating in the 5,000 tonne Bal’zam class, built in the 1980s. In addition to such ships, conventional warships regularly carried out intelligence-collecting and surveillance tasks, particularly when Western exercises
were
being held. Apart from general eavesdropping on Western communications links and studying the latest weapons, such missions helped the Soviet navy to learn about US and NATO tactics, manoeuvring and ship-handling.

The Soviets also put considerable effort into espionage (human intelligence, or HUMINT, in intelligence jargon) against Western navies. This included the Kroger ring in the UK, which was principally targeted against British anti-submarine-warfare facilities, and the Walker spy ring in the USA, which gave away a vast amount of information on US submarine capabilities and deployment.

The growth and increasing ambitions of the Soviet navy were best illustrated by the size, scope and duration of its exercises. The first important out-of-area exercise was held in 1961, when two groups of ships – one moving from the Baltic to the Kola Inlet and the other in the opposite direction (a total of eight surface warships, four submarines and associated support ships) – met in the Norwegian Sea. There they conducted a short exercise before continuing to their respective destinations.

In early July 1962 transfers between the Baltic and Northern fleets again took place, coupled with the first major transfer from the Black Sea Fleet to the Northern Fleet. This was followed by a much larger exercise, extending from the Iceland–Faroes gap to the North Cape, which included surface combatants, submarines, auxiliaries and a large number of land-based naval aircraft. The activity level increased yet again in 1963, and the major 1964 exercise involved ships moving through the Iceland–Faroes gap for the first time, while units of the Mediterranean Squadron undertook a cruise to Cuba. By 1966 exercises were taking place in the Faroes–UK gap and off north-east Scotland (both long-standing preserves of the British navy) and also off the coast of Iceland.

In 1967 the naval highlight of the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War was the dramatic sinking of the Israeli destroyer
Eilat
by the Egyptian navy using Soviet SS-N-2 (‘Styx’) missiles launched from a Soviet-built Komar-class patrol boat. Not surprisingly, Soviet naval prestige in the Middle East was high, and the Soviets took the opportunity to enhance it yet further by port visits to Syria, Egypt, Yugoslavia and Algeria, employing ships of the Black Sea Fleet.

The following year saw the largest naval exercise to date; nicknamed
Sever
(= North) it involved a large number of surface ships, land-based aircraft, submarines and auxiliaries. The exercise covered a variety of areas, but the main activity took place in waters between Iceland and Norway. One of the naval highlights of the year, for both the Soviet and the NATO navies, was the arrival in the Mediterranean of the first Soviet helicopter carrier,
Moskva
.

Further exercises and deployments took place in 1969, but in the following year
Okean 70
proved to be the most ambitious Soviet naval exercise ever staged. This involved the Northern, Baltic and Pacific fleets and the Mediterranean
Squadron
in simultaneous operations, with the major emphasis in the Atlantic. A large northern force, comprising some twenty-six ships, started with anti-submarine exercises off northern Norway between 13 and 18 April, and then proceeded through the Iceland–Faroes gap to an area due west of Scotland, where it carried out an ‘encounter exercise’ against units from the Mediterranean Squadron. The two groups then sailed in company to join the waiting support group, where a major replenishment at sea took place. Other facets of the exercise included units of the Baltic Fleet sailing through the Skaggerak to operate off south-west Norway, and an amphibious landing exercise involving units of the recently raised Naval Infantry coming ashore on the Soviet side of the Norwegian–Soviet border.