International: Russia’s War Plans?

Last week a furtive fugitivewhose name was reported to be Gulishvili, whose rank was said to be lieutenant general in the Soviet Army and whose job was rumored to be chief of intelligence for the Russian zone of Austria, bobbed up in Paris. Last week North American Newspaper Alliance reported that Lieut. General Gulishvili was really Soviet General Chaparidze, and published his arresting account of Russia’s military plans. Excerpts:

Plans of the two top divisions of the Red Army’s General Staff (Bureau No. 1, administration and organization, and No. 2, mobilization) anticipate a Russian force of 120 divisions by Jan. 1, 1948, plus 30 special divisions of twice the usual size located in Russian occupation areas. That will give the Soviet Union a peacetime army of 1,800,000 men.

The 120 “home” divisions are already being grouped in six armies whose locations suggest the fronts on which Soviet Russia expects to have to fight in the event of another war: North army, based on Leningrad; Western army, based on Minsk; Southern army, based on Odessa;Caucasian army, based on Tiflis; Turkestan army, based on Tashkent and Frunze; Far Eastern army, based on Chita and Vladivostok. The armies are commanded as follows: Northern, Marshal Klimenti E. Voroshilov; Western, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky; Southern, Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov; Caucasian, Marshal Ivan Bagramian; Turkestan, Marshal Semion K. Timoshenko; Far Eastern, Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky. Eight hundred thousand men in this army of 1,800,000 are “mobile,” in that they are replaced from time to time by new conscripts. But 1,000,000 men stay in the army throughout their lives, as professional soldiers. The six armies of this home force are quite autonomous in operation, administration and policy.

One of the fundamental tenets of the Soviet Army is the doctrine of unified warfare (Edinaia Voienna ia Doktrina): a principle according to which all warfare must be transformed into action in the rear by all the means, tactical and strategic, at the disposition of the Red Army. Three-dimensional warfare offers new scope for this principle. Large armies can be landed by air in the farthest reaches of the enemy’s rear lines; such forces, in addition to destroying vital industrial centers and occupying strategic points, would also constitute a kernel for civil war.

First A-Bomb Plants. The tense problem of the atomic bomb is naturally bothering the Soviet high command. Russia has the knowledge—but she has not yet brought manufacture of the bomb to an industrial level. Already, however, the Soviet Union has begun to build the first three plants for the production of A-bombs. They are in eastern Siberia and will be ready to begin turning out bombs in some 12 to 18 months.

Of equal, if not greater, concern to the Soviet General Staff, however, is their belief that the Americans have found a means of denaturing gasoline or rendering it useless by atomic bombing when the oilfields are located near the sea—which is the case with most Soviet oilfields, particularly those around Baku. If the Baku deposits were rendered useless by A-bombing of the sea nearby, there could be no three-dimensional warfare, for this, of course, involves tremendous consumption of gasoline.

Aware of this danger, the Soviet General Staff has begun a major undertaking on the Caspian shores: they are erecting a gigantic metal screen, something like an enormous Faraday cage, which would prevent the radioactive effect of the bombs from reaching the oil.

V-Bomb Progress. If they are not yet as far advanced as they might wish in the manufacture of A-bombs, the Russians are well ahead in the field of V-bombs. They have concentrated particularly on very long-range attack by such self-propelled, pilotless aerial weapons, and it is reported that particularly satisfactory results have been obtained at an experimental station in Siberia near the Kamchatka peninsula. Over distances of 900 and 1,300 miles, they can now concentrate their aim within three to six miles of the target.

The Soviet high command realizes that the longer war can be averted, the better their chances of winning. The Kremlin is therefore doing its best—within relative limits—to stave off war. Nevertheless . . . the Russian leaders have already established their plan for war…. One primary conviction dominates all the planning of the Red Army General Staff: that the decisive theater of military operations will eventually be the Far East.

War in Three Phases. As the Soviet General Staff sees it, World War III against the Western Powers will fall into three major phases. Rapid occupation of Western Europe is the key to the first. This can be accomplished, they feel, simply by using those troops now available to them in the peacetime or nucleus army. It should not take longer than three weeks.

The second phase of the operation would involve a fast offensive against the Iberian peninsula and penetration across the Mediterranean into North Africa, at the same time engaging a powerful attack through Persia, Iraq and Syria aiming at the Suez Canal.

The second phase of the war, the Red Army generals reckon, can be brought to a successful end within three months. The Mediterranean would be neutralized by then, and the Soviet would only have to cover its European flanks against assault from the British Isles before embarking on the third phase. One hundred divisions or so are considered enough for this rearguard, of which some 50 would be composed of Bulgars, Yugoslavs and Czechoslovaks.

China, Key to Victory. All the best Russian forces could then be directed toward the Far East, where the definitive struggle would begin, in China. The Soviet Union would by then have at least 300 divisions available, further reinforced by the Chinese Communist armies. The war in Asia could be brought to an end within two years, according to Soviet estimates. And once China was conquered, a compromise peace could be offered the U.S., based on a split of the world into two zones: Europe (except Britain), the Near and Middle East, North Africa and China to the Russians; the Indies, Indo-China, Indonesia, South America, Britain and her colonies and Japan under American influence.

Their [the Russians’] main concern is not the atomic bomb. Dispersal of Russian industry through the great spaces of the Soviet Union puts them in a position to scorn this weapon. Furthermore, if the Soviet Union manages to produce atomic bombs on an industrial scale in time, they feel that a stalemate may develop similar to the avoidance of poison gas by either side during the last war. The Soviet General Staff’s only real concern is the possibility that they might one day run out of gasoline. And it is for that reason, more than for any other, that Soviet Russia anticipates an eventual conflict with the greatest apprehension.