A Special Ally

The Czechoslovak Predicament

Q: You’ve mentioned the specifics of Czechoslovakia, namely that in case of war, the Czechoslovak People’s Army would become a Czechoslovak Front. Which wasn’t the case with other countries...

General Pezl: No, it wasn’t. [ . . . ] In northern GDR, there was a group of Soviet forces, in Hungary there was a group of Soviet forces, in Poland there was a group of Soviet forces. The strongest one was the East German group, there were twenty-two divisions, a huge force, right in the strategic direction Berlin – Paris.
So that was a sort of specific situation of Czechoslovakia. The others were, so to speak, on secondary axes of advance, they represented secondary echelons and were intended to be deployed only as operations unfolded.

Q: What was the reason for Czechoslovakia to have such a specific position? [ . . . ]

General Pezl: Well, the main reason was that Czechoslovakia back then [prior to 1968] was the only country of the Warsaw Pact with no Soviet forces. And to carry out such a maneuver, which would have a field deployment of a force like the one the 1st and 4th [Czechoslovak] Armies [1] were – together with the first echelon – able to form, would have meant a preparation time of several months, and therefore would have cost us the strategic surprise in the war theater. And back then, I’d say everything depended on the minute nuclear readiness.
Like that, I don’t know, in 45 minutes it was possible to carry out mutual nuclear strikes or pre-emptive nuclear strikes – that was the big strategic hit in those times; who will know first, who will strike first and who will first take advantage. That was what the whole strategy of both the NATO and the Warsaw Pact was all about. All that mattered were nuclear weapons, and not even those in the field, but rather the strategic ones, i.e. those carried by aircraft in the air and by nuclear submarines in the ocean. [Pezl, 3]

General Vitanovský: Back then when I was still serving [prior to 1968], the Soviet forces were not here. It means that we actually formed the first strategic echelon of the whole Order of Battle of the Warsaw Pact. And as the formation was offensive – and that is something I can easily say – everything, all those forces, was crammed along the Western borders of our state. Especially the full divisions, all the way from Karlovy Vary to Mariánské Lázně to Plzeň, Klatovy and down to the Austrian borders. First echelon divisions, selected, fully manned and equipped, all this.
The effort involved was so tremendous that... and if you were able to picture this concept, you’d see that these echelons were expected to first intercept and repel the enemy attack and then counter-attack, so you can imagine what would have been left of them. Those were units earmarked for disposal, because the first echelon is always the one that pays. I’m saying this only because even though the Soviets had not been here back then and only came in August 1968, they still did not constitute a part of the first echelon. It would have seemed logical for them to replace at least some of our first echelon forces, but they just left everything to our army.
I once said a few words on this issue in the [Soviet] Union – and it didn’t do well for me, but it should be mentioned as something of a comment. I said: “Look, of course, once the war begins, we will boldly intercept and repel the first strike, launch a counteroffensive, conclude the war with a victory – on the Rhine or the English Channel, and then some twenty men with a Czechoslovak flag will climb Říp [2], and they will just stand there, hollering ‘We have won the war’ – and apart from those twenty, nobody else will survive in the country. This is not what I’d call a victory.” [ . . . ] When I dared to say [ . . . ] that we should also – besides providing units to the Unified Armed Forces – have a division or two on the territory, to defend the territory, because every war is about winning, and surviving, too. [ . . . ]
And I mentioned then just one division, because they took everything from us, everything went into the Unified Armed Forces, so I said that we too had to have some territorial forces – against raiding parties, against diversions, against everything that would be happening in the rear. I cannot pull forces from the front every time something happens. Well, and they of course strictly rejected this, said that this was not right, and once, during one of those speeches of mine, Marshal Zakharov [3] called me a revisionist. You know, when I came back from Moscow with such a label, I was seen here as a revisionist and it never let go off me, and was one of the reasons why I was retired. [Vitanovský, 2 – 4]

Q: It is often said that Czechoslovakia had to pay for the absence of Soviet forces by higher commitments to the Unified Command, that Czechoslovak officials made too big concessions with respect to requirements regarding the size of the Czechoslovak Army. Is it true?

General Pezl: It was enormous, the size of the army was enormous. And if it was a result of, of the fear that if it hadn’t been done, the Soviets would have come here – I believe it was some kind of a natural compulsive force in the background, which had never been voiced or expressed openly. It only took to show a few doubts.
Back then the only thing in fact was the co-operation with Soviet Special Forces, which were stationed in GDR. It was a sort of... a joint brigade – of those who had the nuclear warheads and were responsible for their assembly. Only these units were included in the Order of Battle. And the special VCh units [4], designed to provide secure communications, which were then assigned to staffs, armies and the front. But it was an independent communication system, in addition to integral encrypted communications systems, which the task forces had. But that was from the High Command, which went all the way to Moscow. [Pezl, 3 – 4]

General Vitanovský: Our peacetime army always had around 150 thousand men or so. I personally heard in the General Staff, from Marshal Zakharov – the Chief back then – that a maximum level of a wartime army should be 10 percent of the population, which would have meant an army of one and half million for us. Now imagine what that meant for us. It was such an immense burden imposed upon people, but not only people, also in material terms. To have all these stocks and resources ready and available for mobilized forces was, in some cases, on the brink of tenability [Vitanovský, 3]

The Stalinist Origins

General Šmoldas: The big turning point came in 1950, when Alexej Čepička [5]took Svoboda’s [6] place. Čepička was no soldier, he was a political apparatchik and also Gottwald’s son-in-law [7], a member of the Politburo, and so he had an exceptionally strong position. He transformed the army very radically, all its components. First, he fired all of the old officers from the times of First Republic, and launched a large recruitment campaign in factories, from worker cadres, who received a quick half-year or one year officer training courses. [ . . . ] And these quickies got relatively high posts in the army. Unfortunately, this transformation got a bit out of hand. The factories usually didn’t send the best of their people. They were glad to get rid of some people. And these slobs were to become officers. But some of them had no idea about the army, not to say about morals. And they started showing off, pulling the rank, behaving cruelly to their subordinates. When Čepička left in 1956, it all came out. But of course it is a fact that Čepička did totally change the army in terms of quality. [Šmoldas, 8]

Q: And do you think that the – so to speak – oversized nature of the Czechoslovak Army, even when compared to neighboring armies, to the Polish army – when put in relation with population count, the numbers seem even higher than in the Soviet Union – do you think that this oversized nature was a result of the requirements laid by the Warsaw Pact’s Unified Command?

General Raichl: I cannot answer this question, I don’t know what the requirements were. But I’d admit that when ratifying the Warsaw Pact our side had agreed to these counts. [ . . . ] And then they realized that this would simply have been too much for us. I believe Čepička also played a role in the case of the size of our army. He was not really a soldier, and his views were probably a bit different back then, and it took him a while to get into this and realize that the republic couldn’t afford what he wanted. And then he left. But I believe he pushed for the army to be self-sufficient, fit for fighting, so that the army would simply have everything. He had his support at the Castle [8] of course, that counted. And whether the Soviets had any impact on this – I cannot tell, I don’t know because I was not there. But certainly there were not against it. [Raichl, 5]

War Scares

General Raichl: Čepička was convinced that if not today, then not later than tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, the third world war would start. And I don't wonder; he was a lawyer, not a soldier, they'd just made him a minister and an Army General overnight; so that was his concept. Of course, it was a false concept. [Raichl, 15]

General Kvapil: I encountered Čepička then... I prevented a local mobilization twice. [ . . . ]
At that time I was the Head of Intelligence at the Intelligence Department of the General Staff – I believe it was in 1951 – [ . . . ] we had come against him, Čepička, for he wanted to call for a mobilization on account of a communication message he had received, which said the US Army was preparing an attack against the Republic to be launched the very next day. [ . . . ] And the second time, when the Ministry of Security intercepted a message according to which US aircraft were to bomb Prague at 3 AM [ . . . ] As it turned out, it was a provocative message from a guy who knew that the Ministry was wiretapping him, so he just spilled it out like this. [Kvapil, 6]

General Kvapil: The first message [said] that US tanks were already at the borders, right at the state borderline – of course I cannot tell you exactly when it happened, but it was a summer of... it must have been the summer of 1951. And Čepička told me, when I asked him about the source of this information, he told me he’d got it from the Ministry of Security. So I asked these people, who were responsible for this – they said it had come from the Border Guards. When I got this far as to whom they had learnt that from, where the message had come from, I got into my car and hurried to the border. There I discovered that the information was interpreted in a completely different way than it was presented to the Minister of Defense, where they simply announced that during an exercise, US tanks had reached the state borderline – so nothing more than training. Possibly not even an exercise. There in the area of Grafenwöhr [9]. And that nobody reported them to be preparing for attack. On my way back, I figured out that... back then both we and they had been using those special teletype coding machines, we called it “Andula”. And sometimes it just dropped a few letters. So it garbled the whole message issued by the Border Guards, and nobody seemed to bother whether it was correct or not.
Second time, it was that “expected” air strike on Prague. Every attack by larger forces involved communication getting multiplied. And we had a perfect... or at that time we had a perfect overview of how it looked like at the other side. [ . . . ] And we knew that the communication there was as usual. So we figured that this was some kind of a hoax. [Kvapil, 17]

Arsenal of the East

General Franko: How many divisions, how many cannons, how many tanks and... were the Czechoslovaks forced to accept – and that was in the times of Gottwald – on account of being such a developed country, the most developed of all the “people's democracies”, with the most advanced arms industry, so that it had to put in the most money, too. And they forced into the protocol that Czechoslovakia had to have fifteen combined-arms divisions. Fifteen. wartime divisions. In peace time – that is another story. And also – in what time they had to be capable of mobilization. And the officials who had a say in this were boasting of this. But – having fifteen divisions entails having equipment for fifteen divisions – a large budget we don't need.
Since 1950, the building of heavy industry began. They moved it to Slovakia – well not “moved it”, rather built new plants to manufacture tanks and armored personnel carriers at places where no such plants had ever existed, e.g. in Martin, in Detva, in Podbrezová – or simply in eastern Slovakia. Chemical plants were built, like the one in Humenné [ . . . ] Then came the five-year plans, and these plans showed that the numbers... that it was the army in particular that had caused the shortages. Because the army had to eat, needed iron. This was why so little was available for the civilian sector and the civilian economy.
And on account of five-year plans adjustments, it happened once that one of the then presidents – I believe it was Novotný [10] – expressed a wish to reduce the army, so that it wouldn’t pose such a burden. And that our officials should push this with the Soviet side. But the Soviets, they simply replied: “If you could manage in the war time, then now, with all the advanced industry and having us to help with some technical issues, we hold on to this status, because if the figures were lower, they would be lacked in the all-European task.” [Franko, 21 – 22]

General Mencl: The implications for the society were minimized. “In the West they do this, they have this or that type of tank, this or that professional structure, so we have to do this, too, to have at least an advantage in conventional weapons.” So this was the only topic in the so-called military economy. In Russia it was no better, as far as I was able to see at the General Staff, during the short time when I had the contacts there. “We want this and that – give it to us and learn to live with it. If there are any shortages in meat, food or crop, we don’t care.” [Mencl, 5]

Dealing with the Big Brother

General Vitanovský: “It was the year 1961. [ . . . ] I was there together with my associates, who were working on this with me, advocating the issue of changing the system of armed forces command and control. I said: “Today we have computers, we have automation, so we also need to automate the army command. The amount of information involved in warfare is so enormous that conventional staffs – even inflated to any conceivable level – cannot handle it. And if information remains unprocessed, the resulting decision will be unrealistic and possibly wrong.”
One of the army generals back then, it was Kazakov [11] at the Unified Forces Staff, replied with a “naplivat na vashu avtomatizatsiiu” [vulgar Russian, meaning “I spit on your automation!”], when short of arguments to tell me [ . . . ]. And Marshal Zakharov, he was a Doctor of Sciences after all, told me: “It is obvious that you have not been to the front, ... When I was on the front, I took my trumpet like this and called ‘Nu Vasia, kak tam u tebia armada?’ [Hey Vasia, how’s the army there?], and he told me how things were with him.” I told him: “Comrade Marshal, you cannot mean this, this is not command and control. I know this can happen in the course of operation, during a day when you ask him at lunch time and he tells you ‘OK, everything is OK’. But then the commands must be adjusted for the following day, commands must be spread to the units all the way down to the regiment and so on, and this cannot be done today without the help of automation.”
[ . . . ] This was already pissing me off, as I hated being made a fool of myself, and so I said: “Comrade Marshal, please, I do nothing more than follow the work of Soviet theoreticians, for example the automation – here is an article published in the Soviet journal, Voennaia mysl [12], where automation was being vexed...” He said: “Bring it, bring the review!” And it turned to be an article written by him. He was already boiling with anger – with a Lieutenant [General] opposing a Marshal of the Soviet Union – so I brought him another article, and it was also written by him, recommending automation all over.
[ . . . ] I told him: “Well yes, you are a Doctor of Sciences after all and these are all well-advised things you have written here,” and so on. And he repeated once again, that I have not been to the front obviously, and that was when I really started out... in this respect it didn't matter to me anymore, so I said: “Comrade Marshal, please, I sometimes think that experience from the last war can really be a disadvantage. For the next war – if it came to it – would be something completely different. We have to cope with automation somehow, Americans have already been doing it for a long time.“ [Vitanovský, 4 – 5]

Q: Could you describe say the most important Soviet officials, whom you were in touch with? [ . . . ]

General Zachariáš: [ . . . ] All of them were professionally very well prepared. The rest were under the impact of their own nature or character, each was different. Some of them were almost intellectuals, I’d put general Vorobev [13] into such a group, he was an outstanding man, very learned, cultured and intelligent. Very polite, he never used a coarse or vulgar word. As far as I could see, he was always very firm, but just, even to the subordinates. And that was a quality not everyone excelled at.
[ . . . ]
Some of the marshals I only met at exercises. They were professionals, but aged gentlemen, veteran fighters of World War Two, with front line experience, excellent professionals. [Zachariáš, 9 – 10]

General Štorek: Marshal Ogarkov [14], [ . . . ] that was a personality. [ . . . ] Ogarkov had some arguments with his highest bosses, the marshals and the minister. I don’t know, was it was Ustinov or Kulikov? – those highest bosses, defense ministers. He held some immensely reasonable views on airforce engagement, and he was fighting a big war with the people there. We respected him. [ . . . ] And the others, they were simply politicians, who were treading hard...

Q: Vacek [15] suggested in an interview that he respected Ogarkov for his ability to consider other people’s opinions.

General Štorek: Yes, that’s true. Consider others’ opinions. It means that we simply could express our views. And not: “This is how it’s going to be!” It was something we had seldom seen with such high-up officials. So Ogarkov is in my memory as a truly excellent general.

Q: I went through some of the documents from meetings with the Soviets. It appears that many of them – a great example would be probably Grechko [16], but others as well – had known to behave in an incredibly rude way. [ . . . ]

General Štorek: Strict, very firm. Arrogant.

Q: Do you think that Ogarkov was a marked exception to this?

General Štorek: A marked exception. [Štorek, 12 – 13]

 

From Defensive to Offensive Strategies

General Kvapil: When I was a division commander, I was acquainted with plans of republic’s defense. And nothing more. Nothing more.
I was simply appointed a zone where some objects had been prepared, but besides that... when it came to, as they say, an offensive operation... Offensive operations had been practised in the field several times, i.e. when an enemy attack was intercepted, we could advance in a counter-attack. I was familiar with the plans, solely with the plans, for defense.

Q: We’re talking about the time of 1955 – 1957, when you headed the ...

General Kvapil: I’m talking about the time when I was a division commander. [Kvapil, 15]

Q: You took part in the first exercise of Warsaw Pact forces, back in 1955. Could you tell us what was its story and what was your role in it? [ . . . ]

General Franko: [ . . . ] We had been trained for the role of NBC warfare officers at the divisional level. And suddenly I got the role of the NBC warfare officer at the front level. [ . . . ] And the story – as always: a strategic operation, when the Czechoslovak People’s Army was featured for the first time as the Czechoslovak Front. [Franko, 8]

General Franko: The first one [exercise in 1955] – the Unified Armed Forces Staff itself was undergoing an on-the-job training there, learning what should be done. I assume again that it was a signal to work out a doctrine, for waging a nuclear war and for the relation between attack and defense.
The conclusion was that defense was just a temporary concept. And not a nationwide defense – as it had been in the times of the First Republic, with all those bunkers and so on – but defense is an enforced battle activity intended to provide, within a defensive operation plan of an army – a single, let’s say the Příbram[17] [1.] army – a grouping of forces and assets allowing for an active offensive plan. [Franko, 36]

General Picek: Those first years ... I don’t know what the situation with the 1st Military District was, but I do know that after the reorganization of the army and formation of the 1st and 4th Armies, we were preparing operational plans. And they were of a solely defensive nature, you could describe them as a mission to cover the state borderline. No offensive operation. So for the borderline divisions, where later on I was a divisional Chief of Staff, and until 1964 this was really the only option [ . . . ] And only in 1964 and 1965 – and that’s when you have here the materials from – there appeared another alternative of using the army, i.e. the offensive option. Although I know that the first, defensive option remained valid, i.e. what the units and formations had prepared, they stored aside, in case of a special situation, and besides this they also had that other alternative, i.e. the offensive one.

Q: The historian Petr Luňák states in his study [18] that even in 1960, at one front formation exercise, the Czechoslovak units were to operate on Day 4 along the Stuttgart – Dachau line. And then for the exercise in March 1961, it was planned to reach the Dijon – Lyon line on Day 6 or 7. [ . . . ]

General Picek: I was talking about operation plans. Not about exercises. [Picek, 3 – 4]

Q: In 1958, the 1st Military District was dissolved and replaced with the 1st and 4th Armies – what were the reasons of this reform? It is said that it had to do with the advent of nuclear weapons, both on the side of the enemy and of the Warsaw Pact.

General Pezl: Well – the Circuit was more like an institution to secure the peacetime operation and mobilization deployment; it was not intended for direct control and command of forces on a strategic level. It was never equipped with respective forces for such, it never had communication units for this, its connection with the air force was not straight enough. It was all about establishing a command, which would suit that front character, i.e. operational command on the front level and army task forces, whose structure and equipment would include forces capable of accomplishing the operation objective. And the Front was able to co-ordinate the activity of these task forces, it had sufficient reserves – not a second echelon, just reserves – and was in fact ready to control the operation. Whereas in the course of operation it was presumed that the territory command would be in charge of, that the second part of the unassigned front task force would be in charge of reinforcements of the forces with both combat units and materiel and of accomplishing tasks related to defense and protection of the territory. [Pezl, 2 – 3]

Q: Let’s go back once again to the middle of fifties. [ . . . ] Could you describe the Czechoslovak military strategy, or doctrine – if we may say so – of those years? [ . . . ] For example, was it expected to advance on to enemy ground, and were there any military objectives laid down?

General Franko: [ . . . ] I don’t want you to misinterpret this – but I have yet to see someone declare a defensive doctrine officially. Well – he could declare it, but whether he would accomplish it, that’s another story. Because you cannot achieve victory over an enemy by defense, especially not on a global scale and not on the strategic level. Therefore it was said even back then that we could retreat, that were they that well equipped or were we that severely damaged, we could retreat up to Plzeň or the Vltava [19], and not a step further.
And to prevent them from advancing further, we would simply have emptied all the dams on the Vltava. But that would have had to be decided three weeks in advance. And if the front operation took some 5, 7 or 12 days, then emptying them in the course of the operation would have been of no use, that would only have destroyed us. [ . . . ]
And if there had been a success, we would have found ourselves on the enemy ground. If it hadn’t, we would have been fighting in retreat, but no further, I say, it never was to be farther than Plzeň and the junction of all those rivers which form a natural obstacle. [Franko, 10 – 11]

General Franko: It means – a temporary defense, that had been practiced in the sixties. And then maybe till the end of seventies. Since the end of seventies, it wasn’t practiced any more. Because there was no one to hold the line with, with all those nuclear units out there – were we supposed to dig ourselves in like moles and wait for someone to drag us out of there?
Defense was accentuated on the regimental level, maybe on the divisional level, but army-wide, I never saw in those 15 or 20 years of mine an exercise or an intention with somebody being assigned a defensive objective: “And you mustn’t let the enemy beyond such and such line.” So defense was more of an issue of tactics, while army defense was an issue of operation, and front defense was out of the question. [Franko, 36 – 37]

Q: Operational planning of Czechoslovak Army had been dealt with even before the structure of these two armies emerged. You took part in the exercises – do you think that at that time the traditional form of territorial defense, focused on an immediate interception and repelling of a potential attack, prevailed, or did some idea of mounting an offensive front-scale operation appear already in 1958?

General Procházka: At that time, divisions were already stationed so that they could be used – shortly after reaching the required level of combat readiness – in the first echelon of an offensive operation. Defense was not trained that much. It was trained, because it was a part of the training curricula, but usually only attacks were trained and exercised. [Procházka, 4]

General Šmoldas: The army eventually did get out of all this and I believe that in the beginning of the sixties, at the time of all those big crises (in Berlin and in Cuba), it was capable to play its role. And I’m convinced that if at that time a non-nuclear war had started, it would have taken us just a week to get to Normandy. A week! Because we had such superiority in tanks and such superiority in operational art and war concept that the West simply couldn’t have lasted. Therefore I’m convinced that the army we had had before 1968 would have played its assigned role under that situation of bipolar division of the world.
[ . . . ]

Q. You say we would have won, if the war had not been nuclear – but it probably wouldn’t have been the case, would it?

General Šmoldas: I dare not answer this. [Šmoldas, 8 – 9]

Q: Would you recall how you – at the time when you were the Chief of Staff of the 19th Motorized Rifle Division – experienced the events of the second Berlin crisis (although I believe the events of the Cuban crisis were much more imminent)? What measures were taken?

General Picek: The Cuban crisis, I went through that. In a pretty intensive way. As we were the borderline division and on a high combat alert, virtually for a long time. A lot of measures were taken, engineering and technical measures at the borders were being boosted.

Q: What exactly was it?

General Picek: Well – gun-pits, shelters, underground command posts were built of prefabs, it was called “engineering and technical measures”. Also, if I remember well, apart from the organization of the borderline regiments’ units, self-propelled guns were added, deployed virtually right at the border together with the border guards. The border defenses were thus being reinforced. But what was the worst, we had three years’ worth of conscripts there in the units. The recruits arrived, they were untrained, and in view of the crisis, those who should have gone home were retained in the units in combat readiness. Of course, the barracks were overcrowded, it caused problems. Besides, more emphasis was placed on cooperation with the border guards, whom we co-operated on a normal basis with. Several measures were discussed there at that time, which were intended to provide help to border guard troops from our motorized rifle regiments. It could be said that at that time the division’s units were fully combat-capable.

Q: You mean they were fleshed out above the scope of their peacetime strength.

General Picek: They were at full strength, simply at full strength, because these borderline divisions were almost at full strength even in peacetime, and there were just a few reservists reinforcing them in the event of a mobilization. They were virtually always at full strength. And as the fully trained third year of conscripts did not go home, the units and crews of the combat vehicles were virtually ready. [Picek, 4 – 5]

Q: Could you go back to the probably most crucial moment – the Cuban crisis? Those imminent days. How was it reflected in the Czechoslovak army?

General Pezl: [ . . . ] Of course, when the crisis really started, at some time the operational documents were changed. [ . . . ] So it was time to take the plans, check their feasibility with regard to the actual situation and capabilities, there were always some changes in the structure, manpower, equipment and so on. And the biggest issue in this case, if I remember correctly, the biggest problem was with the frequency ranges. The whole radio communications system was being re-worked. This meant revisiting every single piece of documentation and reworking its command and control security section. The documentation was reworked, some of the plans were amended and modified, and the staffs were ready on the highest alert; at some stage, there were some operational re-deployments, the 1st Tank Division was brought out, the 13th Tank Division was, if I remember correctly, brought out to the area of Doupov, to become an advanced division, to increase the first echelon coverage. In one of the stages, the army staffs took the command posts – not the operational ones, but close to them. The communication system was activated – that was a complete system, because at such times the Telecommunications Ministry was basically turned into a body... of a military nature. [ . . . ] Various links were activated, other links were blocked, frequency hopping maneuvers were done on some long-distance connections, and special links were established. Some measures were taken regarding national material stocks and reserves, also replenishment measures, some special mobilization speedup measures were prepared, especially related to certain special units – the S-units in particular, which were designed to secure the Soviet air force maneuvers on airfields and were also involved in the transfer of our air force to operational airfields. So I would say that it was pretty close, the staffs were dug in, everything was underground ... [Pezl, 5]

[Translated by Jiří Mareš, Prague]

 

Notes:

[1] In 1958, the 1st and 4th frontline armies were established in the territory of Bohemia and Moravia.

[2] A legendary mountain in Central Bohemia, in mythology related to the arrival of Czech tribes to what is now Bohemia.

[3] Marshal Matvei Vasilevich Zakharov was Commander-in-Chief of Soviet forces in Germany, and Chief of the Soviet General Staff in 1960-1963 and again in 1964-1971.

[4] Vysokochastotnoe – high-frequency communications.

[5] Army General Alexej Čepička was Minister of Justice from 1948 to 1950, and Minister of National Defense in 1950-1956.

[6] Army General Ludvík Svoboda was Commander of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in the Soviet Union. In 1945-1950, he was Minister of National Defense, and President of Czechoslovakia from 1968 to 1975.

[7] Klement Gottwald was Secretary General of the Communist Party since 1929 and Chairman of the Communist Party since 1946. In 1948-1953, he was President of Czechoslovakia.

[8] Prague Castle – the traditional residence of the head of state. Metaphorically speaking, also the office of the president.

[9] A training area in Bavaria, used by American troops during the Cold War.

[10] Antonín Novotný was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1953 – 1968, and President of Czechoslovakia in 1957 - 1968.

[11] Army General Mikhail I. Kazakov was Commander of the Southern Group of Soviet Forces in 1956 – 1960. He was Chief of Staff at the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact in 1965 – 1968.

[12] Voennaia mysl – classified Soviet military journal.

[13] Colonel General Eduard Arkadevich Vorobev was Commander of the Central Group of Soviet Forces in 1987-1991.

[14] Marshal Nikolai Vasilevich Ogarkov was Chief of General Staff and Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR in 1977-1984.

[15] Army General Miroslav Vacek was Commander of the Western Military District in 1985-1987, Chief of the General Staff in 1987-1989 and Minister of Defense in 1989-1990.

[16] Marshal Andrei Antonovich Grechko was Commander-in-Chief of Soviet forces in Germany in 1953-1957. In 1957-1960 he was Commander of the Land Forces, in 1960-1967 Commander-in-Chief of the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact and in 1967-1976 Minister of Defense of the USSR.

[17] Příbram – a town in Western Bohemia, Headquarters of the 1st Army.

[18] Petr Luňák, “Za devět dnů jsme v Lyonu: Plán použití Československé lidové armády v případě války z roku 1964,” Soudobé dějiny, 2000, no. 3: 403-419. For an English version see “Taking Lyon on the Ninth Day? The 1964 Warsaw Pact Plan for Nuclear War in Europe and Related Documents,” on the PHP website.

[19] According to a plan from 1961, which was later updated, the Czechoslovak command was weighing up a possibility of emptying all dam reservoirs of the Vltava cascade in the case of a nuclear was threat. The purpose of this was to prevent the impact of a nuclear strike on big hydraulic structures, which would probably have resulted in a large-scale devastation of the Vltava region and the destruction of the bridges necessary for moving second-echelon Warsaw Pact forces to the European war theater.