The Third World War: August 1985

Half an hour later, the position was very different. The whole of his company was advancing, in the usual tactical order, with two platoons moving to the next tactical feature about 1 kilometre ahead, supported and covered by the other two in fire positions. When the leading platoons were in position they in turn would help the next two forward. No shooting yet — there had been nothing to shoot at — but every tank was ready to fire as the leapfrogging went on.

“Ganz schnell! Vorwdrts!” came a sharp radio order to him as his four tanks moved carefully forward to the ridge half a kilometre ahead, jinking from side to side as they went so as to provide a difficult target.

Suddenly the world was full of express trains shrieking past. Enemy armour-piercing shot! He fired his smoke protective shells at once and changed direction, telling his platoon to conform, to seek the cover of a small copse ahead to the left. The sky appeared to fill with huge predatory helicopters bearing strange markings and, worse, with rockets issuing from their undercarriages. The Leopard next to him stopped, smoke pouring from it. One crewman scrambled out, another got to the turret and fell back, a shattered trunk. Of all absurdities, there occurred to Klaus at this very moment a phrase which had been hammered home to him and his classmates at the Panzerausbildungsschule so often and so emphatically. “The great thing about the Leopard tank, which makes it superior to all other Allied, as well as Soviet, tanks, is its agility. It gives you protection through speed.”

“Speed up,” he yelled through the inter-com to his driver, “and jink for your life!”

Far from speeding up, the tank slithered to a halt as a shuddering jar smashed it sideways. Klaus glanced down into the turret. It seemed to be full of blood and roughly butchered meat. There was an ugly smell of burning.

“Protection through speed, eh?” thought Klaus. “Was fur Quatsch ist das!” What rubbish! He jumped to the ground and ran. A moment later the whole Leopard exploded in a shambles of twisted metal, equipment, human wreckage and the indescribable mess of war.”

Accounts such as these show how powerful was the impact of the thunderbolt which came down in the early morning of 4 August on NATO ground forces in the Central Region of Allied Command Europe, and the fury in the air. It was so violent as to leave on most of those who first had to meet it a very deep feeling of shock. Its effect was stunning. Some of the ground troops who came through the first day unscathed were by the evening as dazed and disorientated as the survivors of a savage traffic accident.

Very few of the men now engulfed in the volcanic eruption of ground action on a modern battlefield had ever before been exposed to anything remotely like it. The thunderous clamour, the monstrous explosions, the sheets and floods and fountains of flame and the billowing clouds of thick black smoke around them, the confusion, the bewilderment, the sickening reek of blood and high explosives, the raw uncertainty and, more than anything else, the hideous, unmanning noise — all combined to produce an almost overpowering urge to panic flight. To men in forward units the enemy seemed everywhere. Their roaring aircraft filled the sky, ripping the earth with raking cannon fire. Their tanks came on in clanging black hordes, spouting flames and thunder. The fighting vehicles of their infantry surged into and between the forward positions of the Allied defence like clattering swarms of fire-breathing dragons. It looked as though nothing could stop the oncoming waves. There seemed to be no hope, no refuge anywhere.

Panic here and there was only to be expected. Some lately recalled reservists — and even long-service regulars — found this sudden exposure to gigantic stress more than they could bear. Occasionally, under the swift contagion of uncertainty and fear, NATO units simply broke and melted away — but not often. Men adjust quite quickly, even to the appalling conditions of the battlefield, particularly where there is a job to be done which they know how to do and for which they have the right tools, and above all when they do it under competent direction in the company of their friends. The first day was a nightmare — but it was far from a total disaster.

But why was all this happening? What had brought it about? How had the course of events developed to this point — and what was now to follow?

CHAPTER 2: The World in 1984

By the inauguration of the fortieth president of the United States in January 1985, the world was in transition from the old-fashioned conflict situations, based on military and political competition for power, towards the newer ones involving urban guerrilladom and a ‘Third World manufacturing revolution’ — though in some places this was going erratically wrong. North-South had begun to overshadow East-West.