First Clash:Combat

by Kenneth John Macksey, Natalie Rosenstein

Describes a hypothetical battle between Soviet and NATO forces in West Germany and discusses the weapons and strategies used

Genres: Fiction, War, Military History, Military Fiction, Novels

248 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

British author and historian who specialized in military history and military biography, particularly of the Second World War. Macksey was commissioned in the Royal Armoured Corps and served during the Second World War (earning the Military Cross under the command of Percy Hobart). Macksey later wrote the (authoritative) biography of Hobart.Macksey gained a permanent commission in 1946, was transferred to the Royal Tank Regiment in 1947, reached the rank of major in 1957 and retired from the Army in 1968.

Amongst many other books, Macksey wrote two volumes of alternate history, one, entitled Invasion, dealt with a successful invasion of England by Germany in 1940 and the other describing a NATO–Warsaw Pact clash in the late 1980s. The latter book was done under contract to the Canadian Forces and focuses on the Canadian role in such a conflict. He was an editor and contributor to Greenhill's Alternate Decisions series since 1995.

In Macksey's Guderian – Panzer General, he refuted the view of historian Sir Basil Liddell-Hart regarding Hart's influence on the development of German Tank Theory in the years leading up to 1939.

Reviews

[Conrad Kinch · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book, originally comissioned as a manual for the Canadian Armed Forces in the early eighties, it describes the first three days of a (thankfully) fictional World War Three as experienced by the men of a Canadian armoured battle group. The group is engaged in a delaying action against a numerically superior Soviet force and each chapter covers one part of the operation, preparing initial defensive positions, launching counter attacks and so forth.

The narrative is presented as a novel with bullet points at the end of each chapter drawing the reader's (in this case presumably a serving officer in the Canadian army) to the most important points covered in the chapter. As Macksey was a tank man who saw combat with the RTR in Normandy, there's plenty of cockup, cowardice, chaos and occasional flashes of luck in the story, that make is seem significantly more real then other official "accounts" of WWIII that I've read.
His conclusions (as far as I am able to judge from my position as armchair general) are sound, the only one that I might query is his faith in the Blowpipe SAM system, which proved itself both in Afghanistan and the Falklands to be a very inferior piece of kit.

Not a bad read for something that's meant to be a manual

[David Garvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt, this is the best of all the "Cold War Tuned Hot" novels. If you only read one book about the potential war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO in the mid-1980s, THIS is it.

[Adam Quinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

First clash takes place in the 1985 WW3 scenario and features the Canadians. While the author provides very accurate terms and equipment , the story itself is very poorly done. This is the exact opposite of Ralph Peter’s Red Army where Peter’s intentionally avoided technical matters to focus on the human story . Macksey wrote a very technically accurate novel with almost no human story.

Overall it’s very dull and trips over constant unintelligible technical matters. The reader never gets invested in any character and the story itself feels like some after action report .

[Bill]

The book was originally published a Canadian Forces Publication B-GL-309-006/FT001.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

From my Army time