Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War Read online

  COLD WAR HOT

  Alternate Decisions of the Cold War

  Edited by Peter G. Tsouras

  OTHER BOOKS FROM PETER G. TSOURAS

  DISASTER AT D-DAY

  The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944

  Peter G. Tsouras

  GETTYSBURG

  An Alternate History

  Peter G. Tsouras

  RISING SUN VICTORIOUS

  The Alternate History of

  How the Japanese Won the Pacific War

  Edited by Peter G. Tsouras

  THIRD REICH VICTORIOUS

  The Alternate History of

  How the Germans Won the War

  Edited by Peter G. Tsouras

  COLD WAR: HOT ALTERNATE DECISIONS OF THE COLD WAR

  Copyright © 2003 by Peter G. Tsouras

  This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks,

  a division of Tantor Media, Inc, and was produced in the year 2012, All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  The Contributors

  Introduction

  1. First Blood

  Berlin, 1948

  Michael R. Hathaway

  2. The Pusan Disaster, 1950

  North Korea’s Triumph

  James Arnold

  3. Vietnam

  The War That Nobody Noticed

  Paddy Griffith

  4. To the Brink

  The Middle East, June 1967

  John D. Burtt

  5. Another Savage War of Peace

  Quebec, 1968

  Sean Maloney

  6. A Fraternal War

  The Sino–Soviet Disaster

  Forrest R. Lindsey

  7. To Go Boldly in Amongst Them

  The Invasion of North Vietnam

  Kevin F. Kiley

  8. Fire and Ice

  Sixth Fleet versus Fifth Eskadra, October 1973

  Wade G. Dudley

  9. Afghanistan

  The Soviet Victory

  David C. Isby

  10. Red Lightning

  The Collapse of the Red Army

  Peter G. Tsouras

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay

  2. Transport aircraft at Rhein-Main air base

  3. Rhein-Main air base during the Berlin crisis

  4. Wrecked T-34 tank, Korea

  5. Soldiers of the 24th Infantry, South Korea

  6. Australian troops, South Vietnam

  7. Guarding a strategic hamlet, South Vietnam

  8. MiG-23 Flogger fighter

  9. Damage control aboard the USS America

  10. Fire-fighting on the America

  11. A-4 Skyhawk ready for launch from the Saratoga

  12. Signallers on the cruiser Kirov

  13. Patrol from the 8th Canadian Hussars in action near Ottawa

  14. Kiowa helicopters of 444 Squadron

  15. FROG tactical nuclear missiles

  16. Soviet motorized infantry on the attack

  17. Launch of anti-aircraft missiles from the USS Aubrey

  18. The Soviet cruiser Dzerzhinski

  19. Mi-24 attack helicopters and tanks in action in Afghanistan

  20. Soviet airborne troops, Kabul

  21. US Army rocket launcher firing its special ammunition at Soviet forces

  22. Soviet infantrymen taken by surprise by the new American weapons

  MAPS

  1. Operation Vittles

  2. The Korean Conflict, 1950–51

  3. Vietnam

  4. The Eastern Mediterranean, June 1967

  5. The Soviet Invasion of China, 1968

  6. The Invasion of North Vietnam

  7. Confrontation of 1973, Engagements of 25–26 October

  8. The 1984 War

  9. Defeat of the Soviet Union, 1989

  THE CONTRIBUTORS

  JAMES R. ARNOLD is a professional writer who specializes in military history. He has published over 20 books roughly divided into three major topic areas: the Napoleonic era, the Civil War; and the modern period. His two most recent books are a Napoleonic campaign study, Marengo and Hohenlinden: Napoleon’s Rise to Power and Jeff Davis’s Own: Cavalry, Comanches, and the Battle for the Texas Frontier. He has also contributed numerous essays to military journals, including the British Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research and the American journals Army History, Army Magazine, and Navy History. His chapter in this book reflects his interest in the influence of intelligence and espionage upon military events. Most recently he contributed to Rising Sun Victorious: How the Japanese Won the Pacific War.

  JOHN D. BURTT is the editor of Paper Wars magazine, an independent review journal devoted to wargames. In his day job he is an advisory nuclear engineer consulting for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, his real love is military history. A former Marine sergeant and a veteran of Vietnam, he holds a master’s degree in military history and is pursuing a PhD in the same field. He has written for Command magazine, Strategy & Tactics, and The Wargamer, and was the original editor of Counter-Attack magazine. He was also a contributor to Rising Sun Victorious and Third Reich Victorious: How the Germans Won the War.

  WADE G. DUDLEY holds a master’s degree in maritime history and nautical archaeology from East Carolina University (1997) and a doctorate in history from the University of Alabama (1999). He contributed chapters to Rising Sun Victorious and Third Reich Victorious, and is the author of Drake: For God, Queen, and Plunder! and Splintering the Wooden Wall: The British Blockade of the United States, 1812–1815. He is a visiting assistant professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.

  PADDY GRIFFITH is a freelance military history author and publisher who first studied the Vietnam War for a part of his book Forward Into Battle (1981). Since then he has continued to write occasional articles on the subject, and in 1995 he edited Greg McCauley’s Buckle for your Dust guide to Vietnam wargaming. He lectured on insurgency and counter-insurgency issues (among other things) at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently at the University of Salford. He was also a contributor to Rising Sun Victorious and Third Reich Victorious.

  MICHAEL R. HATHAWAY retired from the US federal civil service in 1999 and is currently a consultant living in Reston, Virginia. He earned a BA in Political Science, University of California at Berkeley, 1972; an MBA from Jacksonville State University, 1977; and a Juris Doctorate from Golden Gate University, 1981. He was commissioned second lieutenant in the US Army in 1972 and had three years active duty service in Military Intelligence. Civilian employment with the Social Security Administration and the Office of Naval Research followed. In 1981 he became the National Security Legislative Assistant to US Senator Alfonse D’Amato. In 1985 he was appointed Staff Director, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and in 1987 Staff Counsel to the Minority, US Senate International Narcotics Control Caucus; in 1989 Professional Staff Member, US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; in 1995 Deputy Chief of Staff, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; and in 1997 Chief of Staff. He has contributed a chapter to Just Cause: The US Intervention in Panama.

  DAVID C. ISBY has written and edited 18 books and over 350 articles on national security and intelligence. He is the author of three books on Afghanistan (and many articles): War In A Distant Country: Afghanistan, Invasion And Resistance; War In Afghanistan: The Soviet Empire At High Tide, and Russia’s War In Afghanistan. He was also a contributor to Rising Sun Victorious and Third Reich Victorious. A Washington-based attorney and consultant on national security issues, Mr Isby is a frequent visitor to south Asia. H
e has provided policy support for US government negotiations (bilateral and multilateral), and studies and advice for government departments and agencies. He has testified before congressional committees as an independent expert on Afghanistan. Mr Isby frequently appears in print and electronic media as an expert on national security issues. He was condemned by the Soviet government (pre-glasnost) as a “bourgeois falsifier of history” and “a CIA agent… with whom accounts will be settled” in recognition of his work on Afghanistan.

  KEVIN F. KILEY is a former Marine Artillery officer who served in combat with the 10th Marine Regiment in Kuwait in 1991. A West Point graduate, he commanded two artillery batteries, and he now teaches middle school mathematics in Jacksonville, North Carolina. An avid collector of toy and model soldiers, he is now working on his first book on Napoleonic artillery. He is married, and he and his wife, Daisy, have a young son, Michael, who is named after Kevin’s brother, Captain Michael J. Kiley, who was killed in action in the Republic of Vietnam on November 19, 1967 in the Battle of Dak To while commander of A Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry (Airborne). This is for all three of them—Virtute et Valore.

  LT COLONEL FORREST R. LINDSEY, USMC (ret) served nearly 30 years in the US Marine Corps, including time in combat in Vietnam. He had a variety of assignments in his military career, including nuclear weapons testing with the Defense Nuclear Agency, service as a United Nations Truce Supervisor in Egypt, and as an arms control treaty Inspection Team Leader in the former Soviet Union with the On-Site Inspection Agency. Lt Col Lindsey was assigned several artillery duties during his career, and also served as a battalion operations officer, regimental logistics officer, and commanding officer of the 5th Battalion, 11th Marines. Upon retirement from active duty in 1996, Lt Col Lindsey continued work with the Marine Corps as Senior Engineer for the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia. He is responsible for weapons experimentation and precision targeting and led the design, development and testing of the 120mm Dragon Fire automated mortar. He has published several articles on professional military issues in the Marine Corps Gazette and has been an invited speaker for several military conferences, including the Jane’s International conference on fire support in limited war in 1998. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, and is presently pursuing a master’s degree in Business Administration. Lt Col Lindsey also contributed to Rising Sun Victorious and Third Reich Victorious.

  DR SEAN MALONEY served as the historian for 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade and wrote War Without Battles: Canada’s NATO Brigade in Germany 1951–1993 which detailed Canada’s land commitment to NATO during the Cold War and its initial operations in Croatia and Bosnia with the UN. Considered to be Canada’s leading military historian of the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, he currently teaches in the War Studies Programme at the Royal Military College of Canada and is the author of Canada and UN Peacekeeping: Cold War by Other Means 1945–1970; Chances for Peace: The Canadians and UNPROFOR 1991–1995; Operation BOLSTER: Canada and the European Community Monitor Mission, 1991–1994; The Hindrance of Military Operations Ashore: Canadian Participation in Operation SHARP GUARD, 1993–1996; Securing Command of the Sea: NATO Naval Planning 1948–1954; and Learning to Love The Bomb: Canada’s Cold War Strategy and Nuclear Weapons, 1951–1968 (forthcoming). Dr Maloney has extensive field research experience throughout the Balkans and the Middle East and is currently writing a history of Canadian operations in Kosovo.

  LT COLONEL PETER G. TSOURAS, USAR (ret) is a senior analyst with the Battelle Memorial Institute in Washington. Formerly he was a senior analyst at the US Army National Ground Intelligence Center. He served in the Army as an armor officer in the 1st Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment in Germany and subsequently in Intelligence and Adjutant Generals Corps assignments. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1994 after serving in Civil Affairs. His assignments have taken him to Somalia, Russia, the Ukraine, and Japan. He is the author or editor of 22 books on international military themes, military history, and alternate history. His books include Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies; Gettysburg: An Alternate History; The Great Patriotic War; The Anvil of War; Fighting in Hell; The Greenhill Dictionary of Military Quotations; Panzers on the Eastern Front: General Erhard Raus and His Panzer Divisions in Russia; and most recently Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternate History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War and Third Reich Victorious: How the Germans Won the War. He has just begun work on Dixie Victorious: Alternate Roads to Southern Independence.

  INTRODUCTION

  The black seed of the Cold War grew long before the end of World War II. As far back as the 1920s Lenin had left his successors a powerful document, a blazing declaration of war to the death with the West. Within it, he presciently identified the United States as the core of the West’s strength. Even then the moral exhaustion of Europe was evident, and his eye traveled across half the world to a country still in the throes of isolation after its disappointing experience in the First World War, to fix upon the West’s still vibrant heart.

  Stalin gladly enshrined Lenin’s declaration into every fiber of the Evil Empire he fashioned with the flesh and blood of 30 million of his own people. Even as the Germans battered at the very gates of Moscow in the dread days of December 1941, Stalin pointedly warned his shaken General Staff that the Wehrmacht was only a temporary problem. Let no one forget, he thundered, that the United States was the main enemy, the glavnii vrag!1

  Four years later, in June 1945, he stood atop Lenin’s polished red granite tomb to review the victory parade over that temporary enemy. As a phalanx of his helmeted officers hurled the banners of the broken German Army2 onto its steps, his thoughts surely sped across continents and oceans to the ultimate struggle with the main enemy. Thus was the black seed, so carefully stored for 20 years, now planted.

  It took three years from Stalin’s very Roman victory parade for the United States to realize the nature of the new struggle as it tried to make sense of the postwar world. But once Stalin’s enmity was unmistakable, the Americans boldly picked up the gauntlet. The result was an almost 50-year struggle quickly named the Cold War. It was clearly war, for no two systems could be more fundamentally opposed. It was clearly war, for one of those systems, at its very core, was dedicated to the destruction of the other. It was cold, in the sense that neither system would risk direct conflict with the other. Although Stalin, in one of his drunken banquets during the war had famously hitched up his pants like a man ready to fight and said: “The war will soon be over. We shall recover in 15 or 20 years and then we will have another go at it.”3

  The brake on the cycle of world wars was the atom bomb. Over the years the implications of the use of that ultimate weapon by both sides evolved into the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD. War between the two great powers was ultimately a suicide pact. But, especially for the Soviets, war was a supple instrument with many variations. The destruction of the West could be achieved short of unleashing the heat of the sun across the planet. It could be done on subtle battlefields of the mind in campaigns of propaganda and subversion. It could be fought safely by proxies whose victories would add to the ultimate victory of Soviet Power in small increments, the sum of which over time would be decisive.

  Thus, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War struggle smoldered and oft times burst out into local hot wars that both the Soviets and Americans stoked safely from a distance. On only one occasion did they directly confront each other—the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—and the world trembled on the edge of nuclear war. For that reason, neither side again allowed itself to come that close to the abyss. On only three occasions—Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan—did the two great powers become directly involved in hot wars, but then never in open conflict with each other, still preserving the rules of the game. The rules were very clear—no open, direct action against each other. Stalin and Kim II Sung had planned the Korean War, sure that th
e United States would not enter. When they were proven wrong, Stalin went to great pains to ensure that his aid to the North Koreans and Chinese was masked. Although it was evident that Soviet pilots were flying the MiGs that challenged America over Korean skies, he was loathe to let that aid become so blatant that it would force the Americans to act.4

  Similarly, in Vietnam the Soviets limited their aid to equipment and advisors. Unlike North Korea, North Vietnam proved to have a mind of its own, an affordable conceit in the absence of a common border with the Soviet Union. It gladly took everything it could from the Soviets but determinedly kept the Soviets at arm’s length. Thus the use of proxies in the Cold War often proved to be a two-edged sword. The proxies did not always take instruction well. Amazingly, they proved to have agendas of their own. In Vietnam and Afghanistan the two powers stumbled over another problem—they had backed the wrong horses. They had staked national reputation on incompetent proxies and could not summon the strategic clarity or political will to craft a way out of those impasses.

  Even outside their direct involvement, the two powers found their proxies to be the source of often serious entanglements that threatened to drag them to that ultimate confrontation both dreaded. Thus Nasser’s 1967 descent into feckless miscalculation triggered a major war that drew the sponsors of both the Arabs and the Israelis to their support, transforming their local interests into great power interests. The Cold War was not supposed to work that way. The men in the Kremlin and the White House may have thought they dominated the region, but it was the charismatic but incompetent Egyptian who truly pulled the strings that brought the powers into confrontation. Even more in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War did the actions of clients and proxies drag in the Soviets and Americans and make their strategic interests dance at the end of strings pulled from Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem.

  Webs of alliances drew both sides into regional conflicts that increased the risks of ultimate confrontation on wider scales. Schisms within the two blocs each side managed added further layers of complication to the Cold War. The greatest of these schisms was the Sino–Soviet split into competing camps for the damned soul of international communism. This rivalry led to a dangerous subset of the Cold War in which the Soviets and Chinese, both mortal enemies of the West, still competed for allies on the world stage. The cockpit of this rivalry was the Indian subcontinent where each found difficult allies in India and Pakistan. It was a competition that came dangerously close to major war between two nuclear-equipped states. Perhaps it rivaled the Cuban Missile Crisis in the danger of unleashing nuclear war on the world.