The Red Army Tank Unit and the American Military Liaison Mission:
I decided to move the story a bit quicker, and to show that no matter the source, major strategic decisions, such as one to invade Poland, eventually flow down to soldiers and other service members who have to carry them out while enduring uncertainty, harsh weather, and poor food.
When I was a Lieutenant in the early 1970s, and then a Colonel in the early 1990s, I was in an artillery battalion in the 3d Armor Division. Our defensive sector in case of war, assigned by the NATO General Defense Plan, was north of Fulda, Germany and due east of the small town of Hunfeld. It was there, had war broken out, that we would have faced the Red Army’s Eighth Guards Tank Army, which was headquartered at Weimar.
When the wall fell, in August 1990 I took my family and drove through the border following a route drawn by my intelligence officer that led to Weimar. My younger son described the transition from West Germany to East Germany as going from “color TV to black and white TV.” The eastern zone was indeed dirty, messy, and colorless. There were no street signs, no flower boxes in the windows, and no signage for restaurants – or anything else. We drove to the hill above Weimar and found the remains of the Buchenwald concentration camp. There were plaques in German and Russian that described those who had been interned and perished there in terms noted by Sergeant Pavel Petrov in Chapter 1.
Returning to the Eighth Guards Tank Army Headquarters area on the edge of Weimar, I noted that many of the apartments that had been occupied by Soviet army families were now emptied, with a few slip-shod, metal shipping containers awaiting pickup so they could be relocated back to the Soviet Union. I went into one of the apartments and found it as described as Sergeant Petrov’s quarters in Chapter 1. In what was clearly a young son’s room in the first floor apartment, I found a surprise. There were some army toys left behind, along with a very nice wood burning depiction of Soviet soldiers jumping from a BTR-60 personnel carrier – a piece of young art work that currently sits in my library. But on a small book shelf, I found religious material, including a coloring book showing Christ entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, along with other familiar Christian scenes, all written in Russian. In short, it appeared that this Red Army family was Christian! I decided to use this surprising revelation in the story, and it appears tellingly in Chapter 20, as Sergeant Petrov and his driver contemplate invading Poland.
I had two army friends who served in the US Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) based out of Potsdam. This was a treaty permitted surveillance operation instituted by the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II. The Soviets had their Soviet Military Liaison Mission (SMLM) operating out of Frankfurt, and each year American soldiers were briefed on how to watch for them. An American army Major, Arthur D. Nicholson, was shot and killed by a Soviet soldier near Ludwigslust, East Germany in March 1985, so the assignment could be dangerous and there were occasional confrontations of the type described in Chapter 12.
The American officers assigned to USMLM spoke fluent Russian, and were taught to defend themselves with cameras and their sharp words. Indeed, Colonel Roland LaJoie, the Chief of USMLM, when summoned to the location where Major Nicholson had been killed, confronted the Soviet Commanding General of Group Soviet Forces in Germany, and forcefully berated him in Russian. It was among the most courageous things I ever heard of during the Cold War.
