Berlin: Secret Crisis
One such was in 1961, in the wake of the infamous Berlin Wall being built. As the international crises developed the tension tightened and the fear of war began to grow. Some of us in West Germany, in the firing line, looked down the cannon’s mouth of war and braced ourselves - and the nation knew nothing of it.
Back in 1961 the world was in high state of tension after the East Germans reneged on the 1945 pact and built a wall that isolated their sector of Berlin from those run by the other major members of the alliance that ended the Hitler war. These sectors, collectively known as West Berlin, were run by: the United States, Britain and France.
Unfortunately, the contrast between the western sectors and the grim, oppressive communist East was soon glaringly obvious and people began fleeing to West Berlin. The Communists moved to stop it and built the now infamous wall. This locked their wretched subjects into enforced obedience and challenged the western allies to do something about it.
The world held it’s breath as war, nuclear war, loomed. The M A D, for Mutually Assured Destruction, scenario was drawn out with agonising intensity. Tension remained at fever pitch for weeks then slowly subsided. It was during those few summer weeks that we of the Second East Anglian Regiment, regular soldiers as well as National Servicemen, stared down that cannon’s mouth and waited for the war to start with us in pivot position.
For the brief while that I sat there believing we faced the start of the Third World War a single phrase came to me that summed up all my feelings. It was: “those dear dead days”. I was, in effect, already mourning the loss of the home of my childhood and youth, of my family, my friends, even the schools I had attended. All gone because my home was the Medieval city of Norwich and that city was ringed around by nuclear bases, a fact which made the entire region an inevitable target for a Red Army strike. In that event Norfolk, would be doomed, not just because of the blasts but also because of the radio active poison that would linger years afterwards.
The moment of perception came when, within days of the wall going up in Berlin, my regiment was suddenly in the field, and in formation, and I began to worry that we were waiting for action. At the time I was a 21 year old National Service soldier in a unit known as the Second East Anglian Regiment and I was a rifle company radio man. My job was to maintain contact with the company’s three platoons and battalion headquarters.Other than that I might occasionally speak on the radio with other units of the same front line status as ourselves. But on this occasion with the provocation of the Berlin Wall I found myself in contact with some very high powered people, like high powered Nato people. That was why I began to feel we weren’t on an ordinary exercise and that we were waiting to see whether Red Army soldiers, the “hairy arsed Ivans” as our squaddies had it, really were invading. At the time the expectation was that the Russians and their client states were only too likely to strike.
It was only when I finally made it back home some months later and found that that nobody here, in Germany, or anywhere else, had any inkling of the drama. It seemed I had had a ringside seat as the drums figuratively rolled and the curtain seemed about to rise on a MAD, ruined world.
Up until then I and my fellow conscripts had spent the previous 18 months digging holes in Germany, living in them, firing guns at targets and liasing with the French and American armies in preparation for a war which, for me at least, had never seemed more than an abstract idea. It was abstract, that is, until that summer’s night.
The day began with a little excitement in the small hours familiarly known as a “call-out”. This was a regular feature of Cold War army life in Germany and was a standard rehearsal for the real thing.
The scenario was a surprise attack by the Soviets. As army bases would always be a primary target they had to be emptied with the troops being on the move within the hour. It was all a matter of routine. The alarm would go, we would tumble out of bed (call-outs seldom occurred during the day) and we would be rapidly up and away moving in convoy to another location. The theme was really: alarm, disperse, drive, dig in.
The regiment would pour out of the camp in a convoy of trucks and armoured personnel vehicles known as APCs which were bullet proof vans for moving troops about. From then on it would be foot-down stuff until we stopped somewhere in the wilds where, very likely, we would need to dig out defensive positions then wait for the exercise to end.
This particular call-out felt no different to all the others at first but within an hour I knew something wasn’t right. I was, as usual, sitting behind the company commander, a major, in his jeep along with the company radio. The first inkling that anything was at all unusual this time was an intrusion on air. Another voice began to speak. It was a unit I had not been in touch with before. I wasn’t just hearing the usual background traffic from the platoon commanders or battalion HQ but somebody else, somebody very different, somebody outside our normal league.
A clipped, smooth, cool, professionally detached voice it spoke briefly. I handed the ear phones to the Major. He took them, and the mike, and the two men yattered away.
I decided that, for whatever reason, this must be Brigade, one step up from the battalion. It meant, unusually, that Brigade was in direct contact with the Major instead of with Battalion HQ solely. I began to wonder vaguely why Brigade would be so interested in “pond life” like us.
Then I noticed the Major, always equable, was not his usual self. He was sitting stiffly upright, not relaxed at all, and had not addressed a word to anyone unless necessary. It was unlike him. He sat, two feet in front of me in the darkness, as rigid as a block of wood.
We stopped at a military police patrol. It was a sign that this call-out was a big one involving a large area as their job was to oversee a smooth flow of military traffic. This lot had another function that night. They were distributing ammunition. Our men lined up, wordlessly, and took the bullets, none questioned the innovation and I began to do some serious worrying. This was another “first”. We had never had live “ammo” dished out like this before.
Shortly afterwards there was more cause for alarm. Another message came through, not Brigade this time, they would be listening in of course, as would our own Battalion HQ, this was someone else, someone higher up, probably Division. There wasn‘t much higher than that, not in Germany anyway. Whoever it was the Major was obviously expecting the contact. He spoke briefly, using the occasional odd words that could have been code. If they were he could only have been giving details of the situation.
Then, a hair-raising moment, the moment our situation crystallised in my mind. “Division” deferred to another, more superior, voice. This one was far more distant. Distant like in Fontainbleau I was sure. Fontainbleau, just outside Paris, was the HQ for the NATO defence of Europe. For pond life we were in exalted company. NATO, it seemed was waiting on our Major’s report because it would be coming to a conclusion based on it and others like it.
I handed the earphones and mike over again. The conversation took less than a minute but obviously enough to get the meanings across. The contacts closed down. Lofty folk like that didn’t waste time in idle chat. I began to worry full time. I had to know whether it was an exercise or not and asked the directly.
He didn’t turn round. The answer, when it came, was what I had been dreading. “No”, he said, “it isn’t”. I was rocked with an appalling sense of horror. It was then that the expression: “those dear dead days” surfaced in my mind.
Seconds later he laughed cheerfully. “Of course it is an exercise,” he said, “whatever made you think it wasn’t?”
I explained about the ammunition, about the unprecedented voices on the network and all against a background of that ominous wall in Berlin. He made no answer, other than an almost inaudible grunt, but the tension had gone out of him. The alarm, the real alarm, it seemed was over. The rest of the call-out was just a normal exercise.
I wondered at the time why the Major made that first statement. He was by no means a callous man, he was, in that time honoured expression, “a true English gentleman”, yet he let me feel, however briefly, that the Third World War was about to start. It was then I began to mourn the life I thought I had lost, the “dear, dead days”.
I came to the conclusion later that the event was never just an exercise but a real “flap”. A flap was the Forces’ word for a military reaction to sinister and threatening military movements behind the Iron Curtain. A “flap” would probably always necessitate a “call-out” such as we had been on. I reckon the Major had let me know, for the merest moment only, what he had been suffering for the previous several hours and which he had had to keep to himself.
Once I posed the question he was able to share it. I got a tithe of what he must have been going through, for hours, or else why wait those few deliberate seconds before letting me off the hook? If the Russians had indeed crossed the border we would have run into them and the balloon would have gone up with a vengeance.
In the event nobody made much of the midnight foray eastwards, not the regiment, not anyone and I said nothing much about the Nato contact either. It didn’t seem to matter as it was all in the past and, as the Major said, it was all an “exercise”.
Once back home I mentioned the incident to a German girl friend of a friend who expressed surprise at the reaction. She was, indeed, pleased to know we were on the alert saying that it would have cheered up her folks back home a lot if they had known about it as not a word about the movements had emerged in either the German media or ours.
And that, as they say, was that. Except that, when we former members of BAOR, for British Army Of the Rhine, put on that badge it means something. What it really means is that it should have been a medal and they were just too mean to give one.
