The Invisible War

The beginnings of the Western foreign aid program for the Communists date back to well before World War II. For the sake of brevity I shall largely focus upon developments relating to aviation and aviation-related weapons systems.

The Russians had always been an innovative race and as early as 1913 the Russians had developed and test flown a huge four-engined bomber dubbed the ilya Mourometz. This aircraft was fairly similar in size to the US Boeing B-17 bomber of WW II. While this aircraft would certainly represent novelty value nowadays, in that era of the dawn of aviation it was far more advanced than anything even conceived by the finest aeronautical minds of Britain, France, Germany and North America. In 1913, Igor Sikorsky (who later founded the Sikorsky Aircraft Co in the US) designed and tested an eight-passenger aircraft weighing more than five tonnes and establishing an endurance record of 1 hour, 54 minutes, a considerable achievement at that time.

However, with the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent purges, much of the expertise of Russia was lost, indeed buried forever was dangerous to have technical skill during China’s Cultural Revolution of the sixties, Russia’s duri Revolutionary period was hell-bent on destroying every vestige of the past, even if it meant losing the very people most vital to the building of a brave new world.

With this scenario in mind, it was not surprising that Stalin should by the nineteen-thirties look towards the West for technological gain. Between 1932 and 1940 more than twenty American companies supplied parts and technology to the USSR in an effort to support their aircraft industry. Consolidated forged ahead with a production line for the Catalina flying boat, Douglas with the DC-3, Martin with various bombers, Vultee with attack aircraft and Republic and Sikorsky with bombers and amphibians. The real impetus for aid came with the Lend Lease scheme of WWII. During this period some 14,018 aircraft were delivered to the Soviet Union and the entire basis of Russian technology was changed to the point where they had caught up to the West despite a generation of neglect and revolution. Other Lend Lease benefits included the delivery of 491 ships; 466,000 vehicles ranging from tanks to jeeps; factories in which to build vehicles and their engines; ball bearing plants- the basis of any industrial nation (remember the importance of the German ball bearing plants in the Ruhr?); and repair and overhaul facilities to keep the newly oiled war machine in top gear, even after 1945.

By the war’s end the Soviets, like the British and Americans, split up the remains of Germany’s impressive research and development effort. The Germans certainly did achieve much in that period, particularly in aeronautics and missilery. The Soviets captured more than 6,000 key technicians who worked on the Nazi missile program, they also captured the important test history for more than6,900 V2 and 32,000 V1 flying bomb missiles, as well as much data regarding the latest developments in German aeronautics including the Henschel radar-guided bomb, surface-to-air missiles and advanced radar sets. It was indeed fortunate for the West though, that the vast majority of key theoretical men fell into Allied hands.

So by 1945 the Soviet Union had not only been more than amply supplied by the US and British in fighter aircraft, armoured vehicles, advanced engineering facilities and their associated technology but they also found themselves with a large and useful infrastructure with which to enter the second half of the twentieth century as a true Superpower.

This was aided and abetted by a Labour government in England who, failing to learn the lessons of the thirties, prepared an all-out assault on helping their ‘worker’ brothers of the USSR. Of primary importance here was the lead that Great Britain had achieved in the field of gas turbine aero engines. Britain and Germany were the only countries to operationally deploy jet combat aircraft during WWII and while Russia inherited the technology from BMW, that research had stood still since the war’s end whereas Rolls Royce had gone all out to maintain a lead that was rapidly being challenged by the USA. In this scenario, it was little wonder that the US was horrified by the announcement that Britain was selling twenty-five Derwent, Tay and advanced Nene jet engines to the USSR in 1946. The fact that these same engines should be used in shooting down UN aircraft over Korea four years later seemed to be lost on the British government of the day.

The MiG-15 was of course an exceptional fighter aircraft for its time. At altitude, it was superior to anything the West could field. Even the famous F-86A Sabre preferred to enter combat at an altitude much lower than that of the more powerful MIG. Our own Meteors were vastly outclassed in the air combat role and soon reverted to ground attack, a role in which they excelled due to their twin-engined configuration and airframe integrity. However, the glamour was short-lived by the Russians as their MiG-15 was actually designed by the German designer, Siegfried Gunther and then put into series production under the name of Mikoyan and Gurevich. German design expertise and an English engine certainly contributed to the killing of thousands of Allied servicemen in Korea.

The Soviets were to toil for more than a decade before being able to produce their own affinitive aero engines. Most Soviet designs of the fifties fall back on German or English powerplant technology. The powerplants for the MiG-15, 17 and 19 all relate directly to Rolls Royce, Nene, Derwent and Tay powerplants. The TU-70 and TU-4 to Wright 18-cylinder radials. The TU-16 Badger and the TU-104 airliner feature turbojets derived from the Junkers- BMW team, as do the giant turboprops of the TU-114 Cleat and the Bear bomber, which is still in front-line Soviet Naval Aviation deployment.

Is it any wonder then that through the early and mid-seventies, the USSR tried at great lengths to procure a number of Rolls Royce RB-211 and General Electric CF-6 high by-pass turbofans? Fortunately, the governments of both nations recognised the folly of granting such a request, even in the halcyon days of detente. This still did not stop the West, particularly the Americans, from providing the Soviets with the required design and manufacturing infrastructure required to wage war on a truly global level. When one considers that every truck, every jeep, every armoured personnel carrier and every tank is, produced with Western machine tools, in Western-designed and built factories, indeed the biggest in the world, then is it any wonder that the Soviets are so able to spread their military influence to every corner of the globe. Following the cessation of hostilities in 1945, W. Averell Harriman spoke at length with Stalin regarding the assistance the West had rendered to the Soviet Union during and prior to the war with Nazi Germany. Ambassador Harriman reported back to the State Department: “Stalin paid tribute to the assistance rendered by the US to Soviet industry before and during the war. Stalin said that about two-thirds of all large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with the United States help or technical assistance”.

More important is the fact that the remaining one-third was imported technology from Germany, France, Britain and Italy. Prior to Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941, Germany was a considerable force in providing military R&D assistance to the Soviets. Apparently, Hitler had got in too deep in this regard and any move to withdraw this aid would naturally have aroused the suspicion of Stalin and thereby endangered the precious element of surprise required to launch Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941. To some extent, the technology and equipment supplied to Russia prior to June 1941 was used to great effect in eventually inflicting massive damage upon Nazi forces in 1944 and ’45. Today, the Soviet Union has the largest iron and steel plant in the world; it was built by the McGee Corporation and is a near replica of the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. The Soviets have the world’s largest truck manufacturing plant at the massive 36 square mile Kama River plant entirely financed and built by US corporations. This incredibly massive plant is producing in excess of 100,000 multi-axle and light trucks annually. Kama River, commissioned in the late seventies dwarfed the previous major truck and tractor facilities at Volgograd (built by Fiat with largely US-designed and manufactured equipment) and Gorki which was built jointly by Ford and Austin.

So when next you see Soviet trucks, mobile rocket launchers, SAMS and armoured personnel carriers and tanks rumbling through the back blocks of Afghanistan, or see footage from the four Arab/Israeli wars, or Vietnam, or Hungary, or Prague or Korea, remember that every item of equipment would have been virtually impossible to produce but for the willing assistance of the West.

In spaceflight, the Soviets, like the Americans and British, relied heavily upon the captured technical genius of the Germans. Their use of the German teams ceased in the late fifties when Russia apparently felt it could go it alone. This is why the Soviets are still using missiles that are a little different from the first rockets used to propel Sputnik into orbit back in 1957; this missile itself was basically an uprated V2. Since that time the Soviet thirst for additional thrust has been satisfied by simply strapping on additional and even larger boosters. The A-1 family of Soyuz and Vostok and the D-1 group of Proton, Zond and Salyut rockets all rely purely on thrust augmentation. The US also uses this policy in its workhorse thrust-augmented Delta and Titan rockets but the Americans satisfied their thrust requirements for the Apollo programme by designing the mighty Saturn 5. The Soviets attempted to develop a similar, new design, non-augmented rocket of similar thrust which was known as the Super Booster G-1E, so far is has been a dismal failure with all three test rockets exploding shortly after launch.

Thus the ability of the Soviet Union to emulate a feat of Space Shuttle proportions is highly doubtful. During the seventies, the Soviets learnt much from their space adventures with the US. Certainly from all reports the NASA astronauts were politely dismayed by the general lack of sophistication in the equipment and techniques employed by the cosmonauts. Nowadays the impetus of the ‘space race’ has swung over to bigger and better ICBMs, mobile SS. 20 nuclear rockets and the potential of the ‘zaps’, satellite killer.

Have you ever wondered why the Tupolev Tu-144 looks so much like the Concorde? The proposed American supersonics did not look like the Concorde and neither did the North American XB-70 Valkyrie which is of similar dimensions to the SST. Throughout the sixties, Russian agents infiltrated the Concorde program enabling a constant monitoring of the design process of not only the airframe and avionics but also the Olympus engine used on the Concorde and sufficient to that aircraft’s success. In September 1971 the British government expelled 105 Russian diplomats from England on charges of espionage and industrial spying. Among the projects comprised were the Concorde and Olympus projects. Furthermore, it was later admitted by a worker at BAC, a reformed member of the British Communist Party, that he had accepted a five thousand pound commission to smuggle out documents relating to Concorde. The Russians had then attempted to obtain an air-to-air missile but the agent had baulked at this. Concorde was one thing, a missile was something else. Is it any wonder then that British and French aeronautical engineers refer to the Tu-144 as Konkordski? In 1979, the US exported $270 m worth of high-technology goods to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. While this itself is a large sum by Australian standards the value of exports by Japan, West Germany, England and France to the USSR in 1979 exceeded the American export figure by a factor of ten! Furthermore, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan high-technology exports from the USA virtually ceased whereas eventually trade from Western Europe actually began to increase to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of US goods. Today much of the strains of the Afghan affair have faded into history allowing eager US electronics firms keen on their Roubles the opportunity to again sell their wares to the Soviet Union under the auspices of peaceful trade. Indeed this is the invisible war, a war rarely mentioned but one that has ALWAYS been well and truly won by the Russians.