Some Thoughts on PHP Interviews with Former Czechoslovak Generals, by Peter Veleff
The contribution made by Czech researcher Karel Sieber in his interviews with a number of high-ranking officers of the former Czechoslovak People's Army (Československá Lidová Armáda, ČSLA) on their operational plans during the Cold War is highly appreciated. Their comments also shed some light on the nature and significance of the "War Plan 1964", which has been published by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP) .
It can be established from the statements of those officers who were willing to give testimony – and we will regard these as truthful accounts – that the document, which we now know to be genuine, was not part of the "real" operative war plans of the combined forces of the Warsaw Pact. However, the plan does specify the Soviet General Staff's requirements for the ČSLA as of 1964. According to General Vitanovský, the document aimed to establish the operative concept and the operational goals for the front line ("what we are expected to do"). The resulting "war documentation" (Vitanovský), however, only laid out plans up to and including the day on which hostilities commenced, i.e., the first day of a war, the general said. That is consistent with a statement by Lieutenant-General Alfred Krause (former commander of the 11th Motorized Rifle Division in the National People's Army, or NVA; later head of NVA reconnaissance section) to the present author. All that the few NVA officers selected for this job had to do, in effect, was to plan who would occupy which position, and when, according to Krause. The orders for any subsequent operations would come from the highest ranks of leadership. It is clear from the statements of the interviewed generals that the Czechoslovak or Southern Front was not to be the main front, but a "secondary direction" (General Šádek).
These requirements by the Soviet planners were probably noted in the ČSLA document by General Voštěra , the deputy chief of the operations directorate of the Czechoslovak General Staff at the time. In case of a war, they envisaged an advance of the Czechoslovak front that would have carried the attack within just nine days through southern Germany, across the Rive Rhine north of Basle and on through the Belfort Gap to the Dijon area. Accordingly, the plan was considered to be unrealistic even by high-ranking ČSLA generals, as evidenced by the remarks of General Picek, chief of the Operations Department of the Operations Directorate from 1967 to 1969 and chief of the Operations Directorate from 1969 to 1970 ("I always felt a little uneasy about it […] [S]o I just thought that this was completely unrealistic") and General Slimák ("Paces of some 70, 80 kilometers a day. That is completely unrealistic.").
We are thus confronted with the remarkable fact that plans for the Czechoslovak front in the 1960s anticipated a speed of advance and prompted preparations that the ČSLA generals themselves regarded as impracticable, irrespective of the assessment of Major-General Franko (chief of chemical warfare troops from 1968 to 1981), who to this day believes that the deployment of the second operational echelon would have made "possible" the anticipated speed of advance.
The extent to which the tasks identified by the ČSLA are also included in the Soviet General Staff's "war documentation" will only become clear after those files are made available to researchers some day. It also remains unclear why the ČSLA document was not filed according to the same security restrictions as the "war documentation", allowing historian Petr Luňák to find it in the Prague Military Archive in the first place.
[Translated from German by Christopher Findlay, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich]
