Cold War Navy Question

it depends on how big the offensive are, and how willing NATO are to let the enemy to move in on them before they counter the attack. (stretching out the support line: fuel, etc.)

If soviet was going on an offensive, and due to the amount of force they could mobilize at that time. I think Soviet would attack on several area with small armies, pretending to be the main force. while their major forces will flank. The tactic the allied will most likely use in the start face of the allied defense is the "Hit and Run"-tactic.

but in the en if the allied or the Soviet they aren't managing to hold it or loosing momentum. The Nuclear arsenal will most likely start to play.

Here are some generalities form my Cold War childhood and teens (living in California, which was quite different than Eastern US):

Option 1: Short, furious, fling nukes. If lucky, only tactical munitions used and we eventually rebuild a poisoned Europe. If not, go watch Dr. Strangelove and ponder crazy military minds and blundering politicians.

Option 2: Short, furious, exhausted/depleted armies. Political madness afterwards. Rebuild the cities and villages in Europe that were flattened. At the time, China and Korea really were 2nd tier issues that could have boiled into a regional sideshow.

Snippets of what I recall from the period (I was born in 1963):

My Dad was in UDT in the late 1950's. In the little police action in Lebanon he had a buddy in charge of an artillery brigade and one of my dad's unit's responsibilities was to guard the shell lockers aboard ship. They only had tactical nukes with orders to use them if people started shooting.

Stories I heard from a guy in the US sub force generally alluded to facts w/o real solid data (most of the guys were pretty serious about not giving hard data). In a general sense, the plan was to sink everything Eastern Block in a hurry, most of the fleet was pretty easy to track and hit. What wasn't certain was the ability to destroy Russian double hulled subs...but fairly universal mission kills were likely through shock damage.

The West simply assumed the Soviets would go nuclear on carrier groups and on subs. Why? Carriers were hard to kill with existing technology and they couldn't get precise enough positioning on our subs (too quiet to pinpoint for conventional munitions).

From a naval perspective, the battle would have been short. A fast slaughter of easy targets on both sides then the mop up of the stuff missed the first round by survivors. Commercial traffic would be 2ndary to warships at the start of any conflict and unless there was a protracted round of saber rattling, the merchant ships were unlikely to be carrying military cargo. The lead time to collect, load and ship military hardware takes a while. Building new ships takes quite a long time (months/years).

What I recall from a ground war perspective in Europe: NATO assumed a short warning period of massed mobilization/positioning and then a blitzkrieg massed armor/air attack from a numerically superior force with weapons ranging from somewhat obsolete to new stuff of uncertain modernity. The antiques were the reserve force. I think the idea was to keep it conventional for as long as possible...hours/days and hope that "our side" knocked out the Soviets faster than they could wipe out NATO.

It would be interesting to compare the viewpoints of Europeans and Post Soviets who are around my age (51). Too young to participate, old enough to remember and have pre-internet "armchair general" memories.

CraigH

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A minor point, but after WWII there's no such thing as a cheap warship. All the major navies tried it and they all ended up either with too little capability to be worthwhile or much more expensive than intended. The Leanders are probably the closest anyone came to success and they were still several times too expensive to be built in the numbers you'd need.
Another issue is the lead time on many of the components, especially electronics. The US shipbuilding industry was perfectly capable of knocking a destroyer hull together in a months time assuming the steel was available. Engines, gearboxes and propellers are a whole different issue, which is why so many cheap designs opted for single screws. Personally I thank that was a bad strategy since the designers had to resort to all sorts of expensive bells and whistles to make it both reliable and capable of delivering the required performance. It also kinda ignored the elephant in the room that the electronics took even longer to build.

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Source Materiel is always welcome.

no wonder US do keep large mothball fleets.

A LOT of the mothballed fleet is gone and cut up. Near me, the fleet at Suisun Bay in the Carquinez Strait only holds a handful now. These ships are supposed to be returnable to service in 20-120 days. Before 911 I explored a few of them and wonder if that's a bit of a stretch. Some were in really bad shape.

On Google Earth the current image is from 4/2013.
Lat: 38° 4'28.48"N
Long:122° 5'31.98"W
The earliest is from 1987 and even that's missing quite a few ships from when I was a kid. Glomar Explorer is the left most ship off by itself.

Here's an interesting link on the Reserve Fleet:
http://www.marad.dot.gov/ships_shipping ... _fleet.htm

CraigH

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[quote="Syzmo"]The assumption is always that a war will be over inside of a couple of weeks and more often than not it goes on for years, plenty of time for smaller ships to be built en masse and usually enough time for new classes of capitol ships to come online.

That was the days before nukes though Syzmo. It was a well know NATO strategy of using the ground forces in central Europe as a trip wire. If the Warsaw Pact would have got to the Rhine then it was Dr Strangelove time.
Then again it did prove that MAD did work cos we are all still here. Just as well it did it takes us Brits 20 years to build a carrier these days.

Incidentally according to documents released when Poland left the Warsaw Pact the Soviets intended to pummel large parts of Zealand, southern Sweden and north-east Germany with tactical nukes if the Baltic fleet's breakout was delayed more than 36 hours.

I think we should all count ourselves very lucky that it never happened...

Oh certainly. I much prefer not living in a radioactive slag pile.

From a UK perspective, the duration issue is an interesting question - IIRC sometime in 2012 there were "revelations" that the UK had barely had enough air to air missiles to fight a week. The counterpoint to this was that this was still enough to decimate (if the missiles worked!

) the Soviet squadrons ranged against the UK and nearby shipping. This munitions issue would probably effect the RN, too.

We also have to remember that at least one major class of RN warship (Type 42) was not actually intended to fight in a high threat environment. RN forces would probably have spent most of the conflict trying to *avoid* contact!

As a side note on Soviet land forces - post-CW we now know a little more about how the Soviets plans differed from our assumptions. I have read that in reality, the Soviets would only deploy a small fraction of their forces to the front line at a time - the large numbers were because they planned to rotate entire units after a short period on the front line, which was in contrast with the NATO forces which would have tried to resupply units. I'm not sure how this would have effected comparative performance.

RP1

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