General Clark's plan was blocked by General Sir Mike Jackson, K-For's British commander.
"I'm not going to start the Third World War for you," he reportedly told General Clark during one heated exchange.
General Jackson tells the BBC: ''We were [looking at] a possibility....of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command.''
The Russian advance party took the airport unopposed. The world watched nervously.
A senior Russian officer, General Leonid Ivashev, tells the BBC how the Russians had plans to fly in thousands of troops.
''Let's just say that we had several airbases ready. We had battalions of paratroopers ready to leave within two hours,'' he said.
Amid fears that Russian aircraft were heading for Pristina, General Clark planned to order British tanks and armoured cars to block the runways to prevent any transport planes from landing.
General Clark said he believed it was ''an appropriate course of action''. But the plan was again vetoed by Britain.
The keyword is "again" vetoed.
Clark's original order was for Jackson to storm the Russian positions at the Pristina airport, just as I said above.
Clark's second *plan* was to block the Pristina runway from Russia resupplies, something that was merely discussed and not implemented.
What you've tried to do, dishonestly, has been to first claim that Jackson's men were told to occupy an empty airport (not true, the Russian paratroopers were already there), and then to later claim that the Russians were inside buildings and were not deployed around the runway itself. Such historical revisionism won't cut it.
General Jackson went so far as to tell Clark that he wasn't going to start World War Three for him. The situation was tense, and Clark's original order to storm the airport could have led to a nuclear exchange.
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