Comment on the Critique of the 1964 Plan by Peter Veleff and Hans Werner Deim, by Vojtech Mastny
The criticism by Dr. Veleff and Gen. Deim addresses both internal and external features of the document in ways that raise doubts about the validity of much of their argument.
Concerning the internal content of the document, Dr. Veleff dwells on the lack of realism of the Warsaw Pact's planned operations against Western Europe as the document describes them. He notes, and the East German generals whom he cites concur, that the Czechoslovak army in 1964 did not have the capacity to carry out the operations it was supposed to carry out according to the document. He further notes that neither did NATO consider it capable of such feats. He notes that, unlike myself, he does not believe that the Soviet general staff, which was ultimately responsible for Warsaw Pact planning, believed in fairy tales, staffed as it was by competent professionals.
Unfeasibility of military plans, however, cannot be used as an argument against their authenticity; the battlefields of history are littered with military plans that went wrong despite their authors' belief that they were feasible. Nor is NATO's assessment of the feasibility of the 1964 plan's scenario germane to the assessment of its feasibility by its authors.
The term "fairy tales" is borrowed from the characterization of the Warsaw Pact scenarios for war by Gen. Tadeusz Pióro,[1] at the time in question Poland's liaison to the alliance's unified command. The simile is tantamount to the epithet used retrospectively by another insider - former Soviet general Valentin V. Larionov in retrospectively describing the period that bred such Soviet scenarios as "romantic."[2] It is only fair to say that illusions about the feasibility of fighting a nuclear war in Europe permeated many of the contemporary Western strategic documents as well. None we know, however, displayed the same exuberant spirit of self-confidence that emanates from the 1964 Warsaw Pact plan.
Concerning the external characteristics of the document, Gen. Shuralev's insinuation that it is a "forgery" may be safely disregarded as a possible mistranslation of what he really meant, for otherwise he would have wanted to explain who would have been interested in forging the plan and why. Also his suggestion that the document could not be authentic because it was placed in "publicly accessible archives" seems to rest on misinformation, since the archives had in fact been closely guarded against outsiders until the PHP succeeded in gaining access to them in 1999.
The critics do a better job showing what the document is not than in explaining what it really is. They are stating the obvious by pointing out that this is not a "war plan" in the detailed sense of spelling out the tasks of all the elements of the whole military machine that would have been needed in order to set it into motion. These technical directives may or may not yet be found it the mass of files at the Prague archives that still remain to be researched. Whatever information of that nature may be found, however, is unlikely to be of much interest to historians and would be only of antiquarian interest to military specialists. The files may well have been discarded as obsolete once the directives have been superseded by new ones - as Gen. Deim reports was the practice in the Warsaw Pact, as it was in NATO.
It is disingenuous, however, to suggest that since the document we have is obviously not the one of several hundred or thousand pages that would have been required for the execution of the plan, the document is somehow irrelevant to the "real," or "sharp," plan (scharfer Plan). What purpose, then, did the plan described in the document serve?
Two explanations are offered by the critics - one less and one more plausible, but neither sufficient. The less plausible is Dr. Veleff's speculation that the document may have reflected "the thinking of representatives of the Czechoslovak General Staff," put on paper "without participation by the Soviet General Staff." Such speculation is quite out of touch with everything we know about the relationship between the two general staffs, ignoring the overwhelming dependence of the Soviet allies on Moscow especially in such important matters as military planning.
General Deim, who knows better what the relationship was, has a better explanation. He suggests that the document may have been prepared for the information of the party chief and head of state Antonín Novotný in his capacity as commander-in chief of the armed forces, but doubts its operational significance. In support of his doubts, Deim cites, in particular, the use of the term использованиеrather than применение in the description of the role envisaged for the Czechoslovak army, which comes closest to the difference between "exploitation" and "utilization." He never remembers the former term, with its disdainful connotations, as having been used in his experience. That experience, however, pertains mainly to the post-1969 period, by which time the Soviets had found it in their interest to be more respectful, at least formally, of their allies than they had the habit to be at the time the document originated.
More importantly, although General Deim does not regard the document as a "genuine operational plan" in the detailed sense described above, he is on the right track by describing it as having been prepared for the Czechoslovak party boss to familiarize him with the operational and strategic thinking of the Soviet general staff, perhaps in connection with the forthcoming Warsaw Pact exercises. Whatever one might call it, the document was in effect an authoritative summary of the "sharp" war plan that its Soviet designers wanted Novotný to be sufficiently cognizant of in order to ensure the requisite performance of the Czechoslovak army in the event of war.
General Deim is not familiar with any such kind of document from East Germany. This may be explained by the fact that the Soviet Union never needed one there. To put it crudely but not entirely inaccurately, all that the Soviet military needed to avail themselves of the services of the East German army was sending a teletype from Wünsdorf to Strausberg, with a copy to Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker. With Czechoslovakia, the situation was not so simple. Before 1968, the Soviet Union did not control Czechoslovakia militarily the way it did East Germany because there were neither Soviet troops nor nuclear weapons on Czechoslovak territory.
If war were to start, for whatever reasons, the Czechoslovak army was therefore expected to hold the fort on its own, against the full thrust of NATO's power, until the nuclear-armed Soviet cavalry has arrived, by which time an estimated 60-70 per cent of the defenders would have been dead or dying.[3] Consequently, the Warsaw Pact tanks that the 1964 plan envisaged would get to the gates of Lyon in nine days were to be overwhelmingly Soviet tanks, with perhaps one or two token Czechoslovak ones for show. No wonder that the summary of such a plan, which outlined what was in store for the Czechoslovak army if war came, was considered important enough to require certification by its commander-in chief, in addition to the country's top military officers. This, of course, does not diminish but, if anything, further enhances the significance of this source as an authentic rendition of what the Soviet general staff wanted Novotný to know was being planned.
In view of these considerations, the refusal of the critics to address the central question of the document's historical significance, limiting themselves to conclusions about its formal character, some of which are not fully substantiated by their own previous analysis, can only be described as puzzling. Even though the plan was not the "sharp" one, it shows in sharp enough light what intentions the Soviet military, abetted by their political superiors, harbored at that particular juncture of the Cold War if the war turned hot.
Notes
[1] Tadeusz Pióro, Armia ze skazą: W Wojsku Polskim 1945-1968 (wspomnienia i refleksje) [The Defective Army: In the Polish Army, 1945-1968 (Memories and Reflections)] (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1994), p. 191.
[2] Valentin V. Larionov, "Безопасность" [Security], Nezavisimaia gazeta, 12 December 1992.
[3] According to Soviet estimates given to Czechoslovak officers, cited in A. Ross Johnson, Robert W. Dean, and Alexander Alexiev, East European Military Establishments: The Warsaw Pact Northern Tier (Santa Monica: RAND, 1980), p. 137.
