Harvey Black
The Black Effect
Dedication
Dedicated to Michael ‘Mick’ Comerford (1905–1961), a soldier who survived 3 years 8 months in Japanese PoW camps. And to all soldiers of the Commonwealth both past and present.
Map
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Foreword
Nightmare: a frightening or unpleasant dream
By definition, a nightmare is an ethereal thing, something to wake up from with a certain amount of relief. The twentieth century turned nightmares into reality for many people across the globe and the Great War was considered a ‘war to end all wars’ — yet it was not an ending, just a beginning. In 1919, the thought of more serious conflicts would have been the stuff of bad dreams, but that perceived ending had fashioned a man capable of weaving nightmares beyond the subconscious of most. In a mere twenty years, Hitler took Europe to the doors of perdition, wiped out 6,000,000 Jews, and left his homeland, and his people, without hope.
The clearing out of old colonialist empires left the field open to humanity’s first real superpowers, each immovable, each unstoppable. Stasis followed in the form of the Cold War. Though cold, it caused all world leaders to have hot nightmares with bellicose events, caused by mighty powers flexing muscles at imagined sleights and paranoid intelligence, increasing in number as the 1980s approached.
I worked in the defence industry from the seventies into the new millennium so was closer to events transpiring then than most. The perception was that John F Kennedy had sent the Soviet Union packing in October 1962 and, no matter what, the balance of power had moved solidly to the United States of America. However, just below the surface, with finances at a critical level, the Soviets were ready to lash out — an old bear unwilling to relinquish territory and still strong enough to use its claws. Stasis remained, held by the energy of things nuclear. But…
In West Germany, allied forces lived in capitalist comfort even though each man and woman knew what lay over the border, over Churchill’s Iron Curtain. With the will, with enough idealistic energy, could the Soviet steamroller save its gentle demise by use of a successful pre-emptive gamble? A strike of such velocity as to nullify the souls defending freedom? I did not know. Would we, who according to Oppenheimer had ‘become death, destroyer of worlds’, use the power of the atom to assert our right? I did not know. Somewhere in East Berlin at the time were soldiers who tried to know as much as possible. Little things. Pixels of information building pictures — some, indeed most, were hopeful. Some were dark — a frightening or unpleasant dream.
Only a soldier knows how it feels when the armour of training is engulfed in fear. In the 1980s, only Army Intelligence lived with nightmares moving in front of them plucking hairs from the old bear’s back. Would the Soviets take the gamble? It was not unprecedented: the Normandy landings, Pearl Harbour, Stalingrad — all unlikely victories, all gambles, and all nightmares for many. They never attacked and the Wall came down; the ship of fools had finally run aground. But…
Paul Comerford
Chapter 1
A puff of smoke left the end of the barrel of the Chieftain’s 120mm main gun as the armour-piercing discarding sabot round shot from the muzzle. The sabot petals, having served their purpose, separated from the projectile and the deadly penetrator sped at over a thousand metres per second towards its target. Immediately after firing its main gun, the Chieftain tank fired off its two banks of six electrically-actuated smoke grenade dischargers erupting into a cloud of dense smoke out to the front as the driver gunned the engine reversing the fifty-two-ton giant back, deeper into the tree line. The tank and crew would move to another position in a last-ditch effort to cover the rest of Combat Team Bravo, harassed by Mi-24 Hind-D attack helicopters, who were in the process of withdrawing from Supplingen, their work here done.
Combat Team Alpha, opposite, in the village of Supplingenburg had also pulled out. A few rounds of smoke from their mortar section gave them some cover and a pair of Harrier Jump Jets had made a brief appearance, one shot down, hit by a fusillade of anti-air fire from the four 23mm barrels of a ZSU 23/4, a missile from an SA-9 sealing the aircraft’s fate. Combat Team Alpha, badly mauled by the Soviet artillery and a heavy missile barrage that preceded the Soviet Army’s assault on the British covering force, were pulling back through the Dorm Forest. Some elements were forced to use the main route, at speed, to Konigslutter, where Combat Team Charlie from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Battlegroup would provide the next stopgap.
The T-80, pounding along the left-hand side of the battalion commander’s T-80K command tank, swerved left, initiating a zigzag movement to make itself a harder target for the enemy they were assaulting. Hit earlier by a High-Explosive-Squash-Head (HESH) round, that stripped the explosive reactive armour blocks from the front left of the turret, they had now become the target of the hardened penetrator that had just been fired by the Bravo Chieftain tank. The lightweight ballistic cap on the end of the penetrator was crushed and the steel sheath, surrounding the tungsten carbide penetrator which was twice as hard as steel, peeled away as the core pierced the T-80 main battle tank. Breaking up as it penetrated the armour at the base of the left-hand quarter of the turret, an elliptical spall blossomed out inside, the heated fragments ripping into the crew inside. The over-pressure burst their eardrums, and blood trickled from their ears and noses. Hot, smouldering slivers tore into the gunner’s right side, gouging into his flesh and peppering his skin with burning fragments, his hands clawing at his face in an effort to free himself from the agony, the smell of his burning flesh making him retch. The rest of the debris ricocheted around the fighting compartment, shredding the tank commander’s legs, his screams drowned out only by the louder screams of his gunner. The driver, relatively safe for a fraction of a second longer, continued to drive the tank forward before the ammunition ignited, erupting within the steel confines of the tank with nowhere to go, until it lifted the turret two metres into the air, molten metal and shrapnel killing the crew, before it fell back down, slewed to the left as the armoured giant, now crippled, ground to a halt. The rest of the tanks maintained their advance, pushing ahead, their masters urging them on.
Lieutenant Colonel Trusov, Commander of the 2nd Battalion, 62nd Guards Tank Regiment, 10th Guards Tank Division, both heard and felt the destruction of the tank that had been running alongside his. Although recognising he had lost another of his battalion’s tanks, the battle was progressing well. All three of his company’s tanks were now racing in between the villages of Supplingenburg to the north and Supplingen to the south. His order from above was to pass between them, bypassing them. The enemy appeared to have withdrawn from the northern settlement and, although they were still receiving potshots from the south, the four Mi-24 Hind-D attack helicopters, from the division’s helicopter squadron, were causing havoc, keeping the British Chieftains on the move, making it difficult for them to zone in on the advancing Soviet armour.