#throwbackthursday

Trigger Warning! This is a series of posts about my personal experiences. It has nothing to do with self-defense, hand guns, or Personal Protection.

Where is the Fulda Gap? The geographic answer is that it is an area in Germany having considerable lowlands flanked by hilly terrain. During the Cold War, it was just west of the border between East and West Germany.

What was its significance during the Cold War? The topography of the Fulda Gap makes it favorable for the movement of armored vehicles. It is strategically close to the Rhine river and other NATO countries. These factors made it the logical location as the primary invasion route of Soviet forces into NATO territory. It was where every US Army infantry and armored soldier of the Cold War period considered we might die in battle.

Contrary to foolish current opinions, usually by people who weren’t even alive back then, that the end of the Soviet Union was predictable and inevitable, it was not at all obvious at the time. A review on Amazon of The Third World War August 1985 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001L1UGPG/ contained this absolutely accurate statement.

“I lived through this era as a U.S. Navy officer, and back in the day NO ONE expected the USSR to collapse when it did, in the way it did. Sir John Hackett accurately captured the built in contradictions of the Soviet Socialist system, and missed only the mode of its collapse, predicting a desperate military lunge instead of the amazingly peaceful self-termination that actually happened.”

The Third World War August 1985 was required reading when I was an ROTC cadet in the early 1980s. We all considered the possibility that we would be assigned to the border as some point in our careers.

Facing each other along the Gap were two powerful and antagonistic armored formations. The US Amy V Corps, comprised of an Armored Cavalry Regiment, a Mechanized Infantry Division, and an Armored Division, along with various aviation units, was on the NATO side of the border. Arrayed against them in East Germany was a Soviet Guards Army of three Motorized Rifle Divisions and one Tank Division plus air assets.

Annually during the Cold War, a massive exercise called Return of Forces to Germany (REFORGER) was conducted by the Army. The purpose was to reinforce Army units already stationed in the event of war or imminent war. An article about REFORGER https://www.ausa.org/articles/we-were-there-reforger-exercises-designed-counter-soviet-threat made this trenchant statement:

“REFORGER was more than an annual exercise, as it became part of the Army’s DNA and connective tissue to the nation’s allies.”

The 1^st Ranger Battalion was part of an early REFORGER exercise in 1975 while I was in it. Since Rangers are a Light Infantry Airborne unit, they can be quickly deployed by air in the early stages of a war. We had no illusions that if the invasion actually happened any of us would be coming back. Our pathetic little 90mm Recoilless Rifles would probably only make dents in Soviet T-72 tanks, assuming we weren’t wiped out by massive Soviet artillery concentrations before the tanks ever got to us.

The Los Angeles Times published an interesting article about the Fulda Gap in 1987. It mentions “leftist politicians,” which is an entertaining reference from that newspaper.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-01-mn-6926-story.html

Another interesting article about the Fulda Gap is available from The Black Horse (11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment) Association. https://www.blackhorse.org/history-of-the-fulda-gap/

Over the course of decades, hundreds of thousands of soldiers served in West Germany and hundreds of thousands more were prepared to give up our lives there. It’s a memory that none of us will ever forget.