Sea Control - Sea Control 519 - NATO and the Baltic Approaches with Dr. Peter Bogason

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Links:1.  NATO and the Baltic Approaches, 1949-1989 – When Perception was Reality, by Peter Bogason, Walter De Gruyter GmbH, 2023.2. Peter Bogason

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today's guest is Dr. Peter Bogeson. He's been deep in the Danish and German archives for this episode based on his new book on NATO's force posture and command and control arrangement in the Baltic approaches during the Cold War. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Here at CIMSEC, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out CIMSEC.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication.

And now, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Peter Borgesson, and we're going to discuss his book, NATO and the Baltic Approaches, 1949 to 1989, When Perception Was Reality. Peter, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Yeah, well, I used to be a professor in political science doing research in local democracy. But in my youth, I spent four years in the Danish Navy as a petty officer.

So I was, among other posts, a bosun on a small torpedo boat and been sailing with small mine layers and a few other things. When I left the university, I went back in my mind to my time in the Navy. And that set off a writing on one book, which was really a novel, a spy novel. And that really made me think about, okay, what do we know about the Danish Navy? What do we know about the time when I spent it and the rest of the Cold War? So I began digging more into various files, and it caught on. So I started to write the book that hasn't been written until then, namely the book on the Danish Navy during the Cold War. And once I was done with that, I did some other things for a few years. And then I went back to this theme of NATO and Denmark and the Cold War. And the question came up, OK, yes, but what about Germany?

because Germany was also part of the defense of the Baltic approaches, as we call it. So step by step, I came into writing this book, which came out last November, and it took three years, but it was fun, I think. I didn't work full time, but I had fun going into archives, finding new documents, and it sort of caught on, had its own theme, own way of rolling, so to say.

So that's how I came into writing this book on NATO and the cooperation between Denmark and Germany in the Baltic approaches. Well, thank you again for joining us. I'll throw out our standard disclaimer that all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. It was very striking as I went through the bibliography there because I haven't seen very much from the Danish perspective to this point here. And that you combine it with the German perspective in this area, I found very interesting.

I'm going to divert almost immediately from the scripture and ask you, can you explain sort of the geography of the Baltic approaches? Yeah, that's very important to realize. So the listener ought to get a map of Denmark and the Baltic Sea. and you will realize that there are three ways to get into the Baltic Sea from the North Sea and that is through Danish waters. So there are three sounds.

You have to pass one of them and from west it is called the Ørebelt, middle is Dorrebelt, that's the small and the big belt and to the east you have Øresund which we share with the Swedes. so the most common path through that is

the middle called doorbelt the big belt and it is quite difficult to navigate in so to get through these waters you have to be a skilled navigator supposing that you have not too much

GPS or other stuff with you and this passage since you have to go slow often is quite easy to block now just also go down to the south south of Denmark and you'll see

you have northern Germany which in the time we are talking about was western Germany and east Germany west Germany you had the western navy and so on but these east and west were close neighbors

and east Germany is very close to the southernmost Danish islands. So you have a complicated set of waters, land close often, water not too deep, which makes it quite difficult to navigate in and to say nothing about how to wage war. One thing more about the Baltic approaches. Why should you pass them? Well, in those times, Sometimes the Soviet Union had a lot of repair places for its navy, and if it was to do any kind of war against the West, the Baltic coast would be the route to follow to get replenishment to the forces. So it was an immensely important border to be able to pass for the Soviet Union and, of course, for Poland and Eastern Germany, too. That made it important for them to keep the enemy, that is NATO, keep them out, in the same way as it was important for NATO to keep them inside of the Baltic approaches.

How did NATO view the Baltic approaches at the beginning of the Cold War? You want to keep the Soviet Union and the war support inside, and you want to prevent them from getting more ships in to the repair places and so on. So what you had to do is to block the passages. And that was done by minefields. We had about 7,000 mines to play with. And we had a complicated pattern of laying out mines at different places, a little bit depending on the situation. So if the first minefields were, so to say, taken, you could make backup minefields. So there was a complicated system of reserve minefields and whatever.

But the main thing was those minefields would prevent the enemy from getting in and from getting out. So that was the task number one during the Cold War, was to make those minefields work. And since you could not just have them lying there in peacetime, You had to wait until it was pretty clear that war was imminent, and then you had very few days to perform the mining. So you'd have very little time, and you mentioned sort of the difficulty of having to wait until the Soviet Union would move before placing lines. But from my own experience, like 1949, there still would have been quite a number of mines in that area just left over from World War II. I can remember sailing that route when we would take my German frigate from our home port of Wilhelmshaven, sort of around Skagerrak, Kattegat, Kadettrinne, down to the city of Lubeck, which was our patron city. And I remember the first time going through, and we were driving sort of buoy to buoy, and I would click on the electronic chart display and information system, or ECTIS, and what is this buoy?

And it would give you all sorts of information about what it was. And there were buoys still marking the World War II mine free routes through there. And I think they're still pulling mines out of those waters on a routine basis even today. Aside from the mines, how did NATO intend to defend the approaches? Well, step one, as I said, was to put off the mines. Step two then was to protect the minefields from being mine swept. And for that, we had the Navy. We had a few coastal forts and we had the Air Force.

So any enemy pulling close to the minefields would, of course, be met with resistance. And precisely how to do this was up to the situation. So I cannot give you much detail about it, but there was sort of a level of action to be done. First of all, the further you got away from the minefields, the easier, of course, it would be to defend them because you had the space, so to say, room to maneuver. And for that, we had a few submarines. I'm talking about the Danes, not only.

We had a few submarines operating around the island of Bornholm, which lies east of Denmark proper, so to say, in the middle of the Baltic. Step two was to have larger ships. We had a few frigates which could operate out there. And step three, often in conjunction with step two, with the frigates, was motor torpedo boats which would operate normally in the dark and try to get hold of whoever was getting closer with bad intentions, so to say. Now, you have three NATO countries at the time.

This was as Sweden was still unaligned. But three NATO countries at the time present in the approaches in Norway, Denmark, and West Germany, in addition to several more with troop commitments in the area. How did NATO approach the problem of command and control in a literal environment? And I believe the reason literal environment is important is because you're going to have all three branches from each of these countries present in some way in each of these areas. So both the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force would have some responsibility in that area from three different countries. So you're ultimately talking about kind of nine different entities. Yeah, well, not quite, because from the start, now we're talking the first eight years, seven years of NATO, West Germany was not a member yet.

They became a member in 1955, and it was not until 1958 that they were really ready for action. So let's take Denmark and Norway first. Norway and Denmark participated in controlling Germany after the war, and we had the consequence of our army forces in Schleswig-Holstein. But after a few years, NATO realized that the Soviet Union in the northern Norway had close to free passage. So one changed the plans and the Norwegians were told that task number one for them was to defend northern Norway. So they pulled out. The army was pulled out of Germany. And to take the navies, initially, Denmark and Norway had some cooperation. And first of all, the torpedo boats.

But after some years, most of those boats, Norwegian boats, were moved to northern Norway. So once again, you had the Danish only. As to the Air Force, it was a very complicated question. because Denmark and Norway together, of course, could operate in the same area and they could cooperate, they could coordinate and so on, but they had not enough airplanes. So the really problematic issue for NATO was to get airplanes stationed in Denmark and southern Norway.

And this was a political problem because since Denmark and Norway had been occupied by the Germans during the war, there was a very strong public resentment against stationing any kind of foreign troops on Danish and Norwegian soil. and there was a a battle on words so to say through the first half of the 50s of whether or not we should take these planes airplanes in peacetime one thing is peacetime another thing is during war during war there was no doubt that we could accept foreign airplanes coming in but not during peacetime. So in 1953, the Danes finally said no to any kind of stationing of airplanes. The Norwegians also had a no, but it turns out later that there was a secret plan, so the no was not as full-hearted as the Danish no. This meant that the Americans helped Denmark with more

airplanes for the Danish Air Force but still during the whole the whole Cold War there was a deficit of airplanes ready in Denmark

for nearly all the time this issue of course gave Denmark a pretty bad standing in NATO and officers from Denmark have told that they really fell the cold shoulder in meetings

because we didn't accept this. But it was a political fact and that political fact became a military fact. What were the discussions with Sweden like at this point as a non-aligned country, but who also have obvious interests both in that region and probably in the event of a shooting war going all around them at that point?

Yeah. Before we joined NATO, Denmark, Norway and Sweden had in-depth discussions about a Scandinavian defense group. But the Norwegians wanted it to be not quite neutral. They wanted American assistance and Denmark too. And the Swedes absolutely did not want anything of that kind. So the discussions simply failed in the winter of 1948-1949, and Denmark and Norway then joined NATO in April of 1949. But, of course, Sweden at that time was a very strong military force, especially with airplanes. So if you go through the documents, you can see that the war plans of NATO for the first half of the 1950s included some kind of Sweden joining the battle. either because the

Soviet Union would attack them or because they realized that they would have to do this and if this would not be the case Sweden was an unusual country and that

created some problems in the eastern part of Öresund that was the third passage between to the to the Baltic Sea, the one we shared with Sweden. Well, if Denmark was at war with the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact, half of the waters between Denmark and Sweden were still neutral.

So the question was, of course, what would Sweden do? Would they control those and deny passage for the Warsaw Pact, or would they let them pass? And that question, of course, never was answered because we didn't have that war, thank God. But there was, as I indicate, there were several ways that one thought about how Sweden would act. It was never clear. But one thing more, baby. In case of war, Sweden had a quite an elaborate plan of how to send officers to various NATO centers. So they were in many ways ready at least to know what was going on and probably to join if the battle really started. How did the introduction of anti-ship cruise missiles change the situation in the Baltic?

Well, that was a sort of shock for the Danish and the German navies, particularly for the Germans, I would say. Now, first of all, realize that the Danish Navy was pretty small and the upcoming German Navy was very big. so we the Danes had particular roles in defending the Baltic approaches by mining them and defending those mining fields

the Germans also had some roles in mining the sound between Denmark and Germany and they had at first a quite elaborate plan of going into

the Eastern Baltic simply chase the Warsaw Pact and gun them out and this was to be done by destroyers but two things came up first the air forces

became better and better and more and more dangerous so more and more naval action had to take place by night rather than day at that time very few airplanes could operate properly at night

of course the Navy could but daytime could be dangerous secondly came in these sea missiles from 1958-59 maybe and those

made together with the air danger made the Germans, West Germans realize that the big ships were really at danger in the Baltic. So after a while they first thought out a plan of making special frigates with anti-aircraft and anti-sea missiles, but that plan was never They were fulfilled because the missiles weren't there. Accordingly, then, the Germans had to stop thinking about having destroyers in the war.

They would have them in a time of tension, but as soon as war broke out, they would withdraw those destroyers. Then they had to, of course, come up with an alternative, which became two ways. One was submarines. They built 24 submarines to operate around and east of the Danish island of Bornholm. So there was quite a danger because it is very difficult to find a submarine in the Baltic Sea due to different levels of salt in the water. All sonar, air coaster sonar, are simply not readable. So it's difficult to find them, and therefore it's a good weapon to have. And the second thing they did was to build up a fleet of motor torpedo boats and join their own air force, because the German Navy had its own air force,

join that into a strike force. So they would have torpedo boats, they would have airplanes hammering on whatever can close to Danish and German waters, West German waters. Similarly, the Danes could go into this force with the Danish torpedo boats. So we created a sort of integrated force between Denmark and Germany. As time passed, NATO succeeded in building missiles, both for against aircraft and against sea, against ships. But it took a while. It took, as a matter of fact, until the mid-1970s before anything was waiting. But by then, they created an immensely strong force of missile boats, fast patrol boats, and airplanes operating also together with the Danes, which also now had these missile fast boats.

So that was a very strong force, if they could keep, of course, the East Air Force at bay. And we don't know, but it would be quite a fierce battle. How did NATO's plans for the Baltic approaches fit with CONMAR ops in the 80s? well the Colmar Ops is relevant in a marginal sense you could say because

the Colmar Ops had the idea of keeping them at bay, keeping the enemy in its own waters and so on and that was a fine goal but due to the problems in the

Baltic approaches of operating just with a naval force. It didn't really apply. As you indicated before, in the Baltic Provinces, you had to operate with the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army cooperating very closely. So that's why first we set up, NATO set up the Baltop,

command, which was constructed so that coordination between the three forces should be easier. Now, we had these problems, the Germans had

these problems with their destroyers. So, how far would you say it would be important to operate to keep the the Warsaw Pact ships inside the Baltic. Well, the Germans invented the idea

that that would have to take place also in the North Sea. So go back to your map, take a look at Denmark, go up to Norway, and you will see the North Sea is to the West of Norway. But there was, of course, a risk that the Soviets would send some of their ships from the North, the ice sea, down to the North Sea. So the Germans said, okay, we can do this. We can keep them away and keep them at bay by having our destroyers work in the North

Sea. And this will take the pressure off the Dutch and the English too, and the Norwegians. So we're happy to go further north than we originally should in the NATO plans. So in other words, this saved the German Navy from scrapping their big ships. They now got a role which was part of NATO and of course the German Navy as a Navy was very satisfied with this. So this last one is a little bit more opinion-based than everything that we've discussed here. So for you to take it as far as you would like, given your extensive study of the region,

what is your assessment of the security situation now that Sweden and Finland have joined NATO? Yeah, that's quite a tricky question. There's no doubt that NATO is becoming very strong in the Nordic area and the Baltic area. At the same time, there's no doubt that there is a very weak part of the Baltic area, namely the three Baltic states, as we call them, which all have Russian monoliches. minorities. So imagine the Korean-Crimea affair, where due to ideas that they were mainly inhabited by Russians, of course, Russia could intervene there and take over. And the same way in the eastern part of Ukraine, there are strong Russian minorities.

So that was also an excuse for starting just to get into the area and later starting the war. So the question is, what excuse might Russia have to wage war in the Baltic area? That would probably be the minorities. Since Putin's idea about history is that the old Russian Empire ought to be reconstructed, You should also add Finland as being in danger, because Finland was, until 1917, a grand duchy of the Russian Tsar. So the Tsar ruled Finland. It was not part of the Russian parliament. Finland had its own parliament, which responded to the Tsar. So that might also be an excuse.

So you could say there are excuses enough to do something. But the question is, of course, whether NATO is perceived by Putin to be too strong to do anything about, or whether for some reason at some point in the future, he will be able to gather the strength to do something about those areas. But I mean, it's a huge guess. It could be anybody's guess, but there's no doubt that because Sweden and Finland have joined, NATO has gotten much stronger than before. And that might and should, in our opinion, my opinion, since I can't be opinionated here, in my opinion, he should keep away. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Peter Bogus.

And Peter, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? I'm working on a book on the Cold War and the Danish Intelligence Service, which has an archive with declassified documents, which is very interesting. So I have some good stories to tell about what it was they did in order to inform the Danish military about what the Warsaw Pact might be able to do. and you can find me on the internet um well the best thing is is to write bogus on peter bogus and my home page will come up well jerry you can put my home page uh on on the document that comes with this right absolutely we will uh include a link to your home page in the show

notes here so listeners want to see what you're up to uh what you produce so far and what you might be working on next they can go there but all right yeah yeah but remember this book is in danish yes yes it is um luckily i was able to get the uh the english uh copy of nato and the baltic approaches though so that's out there but um peter thank you so much for joining us to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time © transcript Emily Beynon Oh, help me, Bob, I'm bullied in the alley. Why are they bullying me?

Help me, Bob, I'm bullied in the alley. Bullied, I'm in Shemona.