GERMANY: Order of Battle

Russian soldiers last week were on the march in Eastern Germany. Over the same military training fields that had once rumbled under the boots and tank treads of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht, the Russian columns toiled and sweated in the summer sun. Officially, the Russians were just on maneuvers. But Western Europe was struck with an obvious and ominous comparison: the European country most vulnerable to the kind of Communist aggression that had struck partitioned Korea was partitioned Germany. Was the Russian rumble as ominous as it sounded? Last week, after a close investigation, TIME’S Berlin Bureau reported on the imposing Soviet strength arrayed in its sector of Germany.

In Eastern Germany, the Russians have about 275,000 ground troops. These are the men who are now on summer maneuvers. They are well trained, in tiptop physical condition, live as much as possible under actual field conditions, and are rigidly disciplined. They are organized into at least 20 divisions; about half of them are infantry and supporting artillery, the other half armor. The divisions are assigned to five armies, each covering, roughly, one of the five Lander (states) in the Soviet zone. Most of the armies are composed of two corps; each corps is made up of one armored and one infantry division.

“Ready Squads.” The Russians, who well remember the havoc wrought by Hitler’s Panzer divisions, have worked mightily at tank production, now have more tanks in service than the rest of the world’s armies combined. In Germany alone, the Reds have at least 4,400 tanks, and in general they are better than any now in regular use by U.S. armored divisions. Most of the tanks in East Germany are 33-ton T-34s null gun), the types used in the Communist attack in Korea.

To back up their own regular forces, the Russians have also organized 50,000 East Germans into Bereitschaften (“ready squads” or “emergency units”) of the Red-run “People’s Police.” Members of the Bereitschaften are not U.S.-style auxiliary policemen equipped with armbands and nightsticks; they are tough, well-disciplined soldiers who have had intensive training with everything from rifles to tanks to artillery.

In the air, too, the Russians have a staggering edge on the Western Allies. There are at least 750 first-line jet and piston fighters on the Reds’ 29 East German airfields; attack and dive bombers are present in impressive force.

Slimmer. Last week most informed Western political and military analysts still doubted that the Soviet Union would attack Western Germany and thereby almost surely provoke World War III.

If a Russian attack does come, most experts think it would be in the form of a double-pronged tank and infantry rush across the North German plain and down the Channel coast; smaller units would be committed to destroy U.S. forces in Bavaria, while Soviet reinforcements from the east would pour steadily in through Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Against this formidable Russian force, the West can muster little indeed. Western Germany has no troops; France might put three divisions in the field; Great Britain’s strength in occupied Germany is now probably not more than two divisions. The U.S. has one understrength division and four or five housekeeping and constabulary regiments scattered from one end of its zone to the other. U.S. air strength is shockingly inadequate, consists of little more than two fighter groups and one bomber group. U.S. observers say that the ratio of Soviet to U.S. air strength is about 15 to 1.