The Cold War: A MILITARY History (40 page)

fn1
In Greek mythology, the aegis was a short cloak, later a shield, which protected Zeus from harm.

fn2
The four Kidd-class ships were ordered by the shah of Iran, but, following the shah’s overthrow, the new government cancelled the order and the US navy bought the ships. They were, in essence, anti-aircraft versions of the Spruance class.

fn3
A fourth was greatly delayed during construction by the ending of the Cold War, and was eventually commissioned into the Ukrainian navy in 1995 with the name
Vilna Ukraina
.

fn4
This rate of fire was theoretical; in practice there were many stoppages, which reduced the rate considerably.

fn5
The Italian ships were two cruisers and four destroyers, which were allocated to France under the terms of the 1948 peace treaty with Italy.

21

NATO’s 1950s Mine-Warfare Programme

THE NATO MINE-WARFARE
programme of the 1950s showed the Alliance at its best. A threat was identified, concerted action was agreed, and a small number of designs were produced quickly.

Mine warfare has been a major feature of the naval scene for well over a hundred years, but interest in the subject has alternated between spurts of enthusiasm, with an attendant allocation of funds and resources, and periods of almost total uninterest, when the mine-countermeasures community has been starved of funds, manpower and resources. The latter periods end abruptly when a major ship is sunk or severely damaged by a mine, at which point the subject suddenly receives the highest priority, accompanied by renewed enthusiasm and funding.

The late 1940s was a period of uninterest, despite the fact that mines had been a major feature of naval warfare during the Second World War, during which the Axis and Allied navies laid some 350,000 mines each.
^fn1
Casualties are sometimes difficult to attribute, but a British analysis concluded that Axis mines sank 281 British warships and 296 merchant vessels, while British-laid mines sank 1,047 enemy ships and damaged 5,412. Further analyses of the Second World War showed that, important as they were, the number of sinkings achieved was not the sole criterion of success and that mines had a number of additional and significant effects. First, they diverted enemy naval and merchant vessels into areas where they could more easily be attacked by other means; second, they forced the enemy to divert considerable manpower to mine-countermeasures (MCM) tasks; and, third, enemy production capacity was diverted into manufacturing both mines and MCM equipment.

Such telling evidence was ignored in the face of post-war manpower and
financial
cuts, and in the late 1940s other naval threats, particularly those posed by fast submarines and high-speed cruisers, were accorded a higher priority. As a result, minesweepers were given a very low priority for retention, although, ironically, the only elements of the defeated German and Japanese navies to serve on after the war were special minesweeping forces, which worked from 1945 until the early 1950s clearing the vast minefields which had been laid between 1939 and 1945.

There were a number of additional reasons for the lack of enthusiasm for MCM activities at this particular time. First, since the minesweepers had to go into minefields to ply their trade, their losses were inevitably heavy. Second, all existing sweeping methods were slow, and the speed of clearance could be increased only by having large numbers of sweepers, which would require considerable manpower to operate them. The problem was exacerbated by the requirement to construct the vessels using materials such as amagnetic steel, aluminium, wood or, later, glass fibre, which would be less likely to trigger a magnetic mine.

In the Korean War, however, United Nations naval forces found themselves severely hampered by the minefields laid by the weaker force, the North Korean navy. Some 4,000 mines were supplied to North Korea by the Soviet Union, 75 per cent of which were actually laid during a period of three weeks, using very primitive laying methods. There were two types of mine – a relatively modern Soviet magnetic mine and an ancient contact mine whose design dated back to the Russo-Japanese war – and both caused repeated problems, especially at the W
ǒ
nsan landings, where four minesweepers and one fleet tug were sunk and five destroyers were damaged before the swept channel was fully cleared.

Having observed the Korean War closely, NATO planners concluded that, if war came, the Soviets would make massive use of offensive mining around the coasts of western Europe, where just a few mines could close vital ports, estuaries or choke points for days – perhaps even weeks. It was also assessed that mines would be one of the measures used to disrupt US and Canadian reinforcements reaching Europe.

This threat to NATO was made even more serious by technological developments. The traditional moored contact mine was still in use, floating at a fixed height above the bottom, held in place by a cable anchored to the seabed. Such mines were swept by one or more minesweepers towing ‘mechanical sweeps’ consisting of long cables which engaged the mooring cable and then cut it, whereupon the mine rose to the surface, where it was detonated by rifle or gunfire. Magnetic, acoustic and pressure mines were introduced early in the Second World War, but, after initial successes, their
modis operandi
were identified and countermeasures were developed which reduced, although they did not totally remove, their danger.

While all NATO navies faced the same type of threat, there was a significant
difference
in the scale, since the Soviet navy of the early 1950s was unlikely to be able to mine the US coast or harbour entrances, although there was a small threat from submarine-laid mines. European waters, on the other hand, were within easy reach. As a result, an urgent programme was started to build mine countermeasures vessels (MCMVs) for many European navies. Both the American and the British navies had been working in parallel on the mine problem since the late 1940s and came up with generally similar countermeasure designs, which were adopted, in one form or another, by most other NATO navies, with the great majority of construction being funded under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program. In addition, foreign designs which had been approved by the US navy were built in foreign yards under the Off-Shore Purchases scheme, funded by the US Military Supply Agency. Further ships were also acquired by the foreign countries concerned, using national funds. The programme involved three types of MCMV.
^fn2

OCEAN-GOING MINESWEEPERS

Ocean-going minesweepers built during the Second World War had steel hulls, since it was considered that the dangers of the new magnetic and acoustic mines were less in open waters. Nevertheless, the threat from more sensitive Soviet mines led the US navy to develop a new wooden-hulled ocean minesweeper, the Agile class, with a hull constructed of laminated timbers and in which fittings were made of bronze or stainless steel, to reduce the magnetic signature to the absolute minimum. Despite their small size (they displaced 735 tonnes) these were extremely sophisticated ships, whose cost per tonne was equalled only by contemporary submarines. Ninety-six were built between 1953 and 1960, of which sixty-two went to the US and thirty-four to other NATO navies.

COASTAL MINESWEEPERS

Two wooden-hulled coastal-minesweepers designs were developed: the US Bluebird and the British Ton classes. The Bluebird class was an enlarged version of a wartime design, with improved sweeping capabilities and better sea-keeping – particularly stability. One hundred and twenty-eight were built in the USA (twenty for the United States and the remainder for overseas), and many more were built abroad.

The British Ton was somewhat larger than the Agile, although it generated a less powerful sweeping current to counter magnetic mines. A total of 205 were built, of which twenty were built in Canada as the Bay class (ten for Canada, six for France, four for Turkey), thirty-four were built in France (all for France), thirty-two were built in the Netherlands (all for the Dutch navy), four were built in Portugal (all for Portugal), and the remaining 115 for the British navy.

INSHORE MINESWEEPERS

There were also two designs for inshore minesweeper. Fourteen of the US Cove class were built – two for the United States and the rest for other NATO countries – but the British Ham class was built in considerably larger numbers. One hundred and eight were built in the UK, of which fifteen went to France and the remainder to the British navy, while another twenty were built in Italy (all for Italy) and sixteen in Belgium. Sixteen more were built in the Netherlands to a Dutch design which was generally similar to the Ham class. The British also built a further eleven minehunters of the Ley class, which was adapted from the Ham class.

AN IGNORED LESSON

This MCM programme showed just what NATO was capable of, when all the member nations put their minds to it. As shown in
Appendix 24
, the 1950s MCM programme resulted in the production of 703 vessels and totally transformed the Alliance’s capabilities. Furthermore, by restricting the origins of the designs to two sources (the USA and the UK) a large degree of commonality was assured, which was further strengthened because the recipient navies naturally found themselves using common equipment and procedures. In the following decades there were many more areas where such a common approach would have resulted in more equipment, produced more quickly and at less cost, but sadly it was not to be.

fn1
Details of sea mines laid in the Second World War and the damage they caused are given in
Appendix 23
.

fn2
Details of the MCM programme and specifications of the ships involved are given in
Appendix 24
.

22

Amphibious Warfare

THE END OF
the Second World War found the US and British navies with huge fleets of amphibious-warfare ships and a wealth of expertise in their use, arising from landing operations in North Africa, in Sicily, mainland Italy, Normandy and the south of France in Europe, and in the US island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. Although the Soviet navy had conducted over 100 amphibious landings, those were almost always as a flanking move in support of a land operation, typically involving 3,000 troops, which was minuscule in comparison with the scale of their Western allies’ operations, and without the benefit of specialized shipping.

In the late 1940s there was little perceived requirement for amphibious landings, and it was thought at high levels in the Pentagon that the atomic bomb had outdated such massive concentrations of ships. The Inch’
ǒ
n landings in Korea (September 1950) and the Anglo-French landings at Suez (6 November 1956) brought the subject back into focus, but with a marked change in emphasis. Second World War amphibious tactics had centred on large fleets of flat-bottomed landing vessels running on to a beach to deliver their loads of men, tanks, vehicles and equipment. Such vessels were relatively cheap, easy to build (most were constructed by non-specialist shipyards), could be produced in vast numbers, and were usually able to take their loads direct from the port of loading to the target beach without any need for cross-loading.

Unfortunately, they were also very slow – even the US navy’s post-war tank landing ships (LSTs) were not capable of more than 15 knots – while the landing beaches had to be carefully selected to meet stringent criteria for slope and composition. In addition, there was a firm commitment in the US navy to a 20 knot speed for task groups, which no LST design could ever meet. As a result, there was a steady move away from such ships to dock landing ships (LSDs), which carried small landing craft internally, to be launched offshore and used for the final run-in to the beach. A second type
of
ship was the helicopter carrier, which not only enabled troops and equipment to be delivered ashore, but had the great advantage of missing out the very dangerous beach-line altogether and delivering the troops to a point of the commander’s choosing, which could be anything from 500 m to 50 km inland.

Above all, the advantage of amphibious troops, as was repeatedly demonstrated during the Cold War, was that they could move around the globe in international waters, ‘hover’ just over the horizon from a trouble spot, and then land within a few hours of being given the order to deploy.

THE US MARINE CORPS

Throughout the Cold War, the US Marine Corps (USMC) was in a class of its own as regards size, complexity, equipment and capability. In 1987, for example, it numbered 199,600 men and women and fielded three mobile divisions, equipped with their own armour and artillery, and with their own logistic support. It should be noted that a USMC division is far larger than a division in any other armed force in the world, and consists of some 18,000 Marines, including attached navy personnel, but excluding the support personnel who would normally deploy with the division.

Until the late 1980s each of these Marine divisions was composed of three regiments, each of three battalions. Combat support troops included an artillery regiment (each of three artillery battalions), a tank battalion, a reconnaissance battalion, a light-armoured assault battalion and an engineer battalion. Support units included a service battalion, a shore-party battalion, a service battalion, a medical battalion and a motor-transport battalion.

Each division had an associated Marine Air Wing, which operated some 315 aircraft, including fighters, attack aircraft and helicopters. There were also some sixty amphibious-warfare ships dedicated to moving and landing Marines. Even just one USMC division and its associated air wing represented a greater concentration of power than the totality of the armed forces possessed by most nations.

USMC doctrine was to tailor forces to the requirement, and the basic building block for this was the Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU), which combined an infantry battalion, an aviation squadron and a service/support unit. Two to five MAUs could be combined into a Marine Amphibious Brigade (MAB).