5/5. This book was a treat for me to read. It is a fictionalized version of the war that never happened—the Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany. This topic has been covered before (including one of my favorite novels, “Team Yankee” by Harold Coyle), but this one differs in a number of ways. Most are set in the 1984/1985 timeframe when most of the U.S. forces are still using M60A3 tanks and all infantry units are still riding around in M113 personnel carriers (and the Russians have the T62 tank). This book’s 1989 setting finds us equipped with M1A1 Abrams tanks and M2/M3 Fighting Vehicles (fighting the Russian T80). This narrative is also based on the real V Corps OPLAN 33001 [Declassified], also known as the General Defense Plan (GDP). V Corps consisted of the 3rd Armored Division and the 8th Infantry Division (Mechanized). They defended left and right, respectively, along a line roughly from Bad Hersfeld to Fulda and back to Frankfurt, Germany. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment served as a covering force out front. As a member of 8 ID(M) twice (1981-84 and 1988-91), I was intimately familiar with this battlefield, having studied it in detail and driven through it on a few war-planning trips. Although the book focuses mainly on 3-11 ACR and 3rd AD, some of the later action moves into the 8th ID(M) sector and takes place in the exact countryside where my mechanized infantry battalion would have actually fought in one of our contingency plans! Making this book even more special, while reading, I was able to continually consult a topographical map of the area which I still have from the Infantry Officer Advanced Course in 1980 (we had discussed a scenario unrelated to the GDP on a corner of that special map sheet).
Despite my positive review, I still have a few minor sources of irritation with this book:
-The use of the term “Inner German Border” instead of Inter-German Border.
-Excessive verbiage during radio communications (once two sides of a conversation have connected and identified each other, it is not necessary to continue to self-identify—e.g. “Alpha Six, this is Alpha One-Six…” every single subsequent time you key the mike.