Central Front in Europe

The chief zone of contention between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact alliances on the inter-German frontier. When extended to the Swiss frontier, the borderland took on the designation central front.

The division of Germany into eastern and western zones of occupation in 1945 presaged the further division of Europe and the evolution of the Cold War. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the chief zone of contention between NATO and the Warsaw Pact alliances lay on the inter-German frontier. For half a century, the critical operational area for the contending armies and air forces and the focus of strategic and force planning was the anticipated crucial opening battles of any east–west confrontation.

The particular challenges of the central front had few parallels in contemporary history. By 1956, the opposing alliance systems were arrayed, and the central front was occupied by the forces and key nations that made up the balance of power in Europe. West of the inter-German frontier lay the industrial and population centers of West Germany, the Rhine River, the Low Countries, English Channel, Baltic approaches, and France. In the opposite direction were the traditional invasion routes into Russia, including the Warsaw-Smolensk-Moscow highway. The forces deployed on each side included the largest ready ground unit of each nation: the sole elite army level formation of the Soviet Union, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG), as well as the British Army of the Rhine, the U.S. Seventh Army, and the French First Army. By the mid-1980s, standing forces of 26–58 divisions and 1,800–4,000 combat aircraft opposed each other on the central front.

Distance made the reinforcement of the central front far easier for the Soviet Union than for the NATO alliance. The Warsaw Pact held a second echelon in Eastern Europe and a third echelon from the white Russian and Ukrainian military districts of the Soviet Union. However, the United States eventually established equipment sets in German depots and planned a massive airlift program promising 10 divisions in 10 days, which, combined with the French, British, and West German mobilization schemes, made ground defense feasible for NATO. The airpower of NATO was generally presumed to be superior in its quality of equipment, ordnance, and command and control, promising at least air parity and sustaining hopes for air superiority in NATO–Warsaw Pact combat.

What worried NATO planners most about the central front was the feasibility of an attack without warning from the east using only the GSFG, Czech, and East German forces to effect a breakthrough that would unhinge the NATO mobilization and concentration plans. Most war planning on the NATO side assumed a few days of warning, sufficient to initiate national mobilization of reserves and the U.S. air bridge. The critical and largely unknown factor in the calculus remained the tactical nuclear weapons available to each side. Experts acknowledged that either force, faced with disaster, would opt for nuclear fire support to extricate and preserve its operational capability.

[Page 112]In addition to the ground and air picture, the locally available nuclear weaponry of the NATO alliance and the Soviet Union experienced an upgrade during the 1980s. As a result, a NATO conflict could easily degenerate into a regional exchange of ballistic and cruise missile strikes coupled with the already potent long-range aircraft nuclear strike capability, such that the damage would far exceed the combat zone of the opposing armies. The U.S Army and Air Force openly embraced such concepts with their Air-Land Battle Doctrine and tactics for striking far behind the opposing field armies.

...