Why the Soviets Should Have Invaded West Germany on a Friday Night
Or: A Cold War defence strategy involving tax-free vodka, bad decisions, and a very wide window sill.
If the Soviet General Staff had understood the British Army properly, they would not have attacked at dawn.
They would have waited until Friday evening.
By then, large parts of the British Army of the Rhine were either drunk, becoming drunk, recovering from being drunk, or trying to remember where they had left their boots.
In 1972, I was serving with 1 Armoured Division and Signal Regiment in Verden, West Germany. Booze was tax-free for soldiers and their families, as were cigarettes and petrol. If I remember correctly, a bottle of vodka cost about 2.5 Deutschmarks in the NAAFI supermarket, practically pocket money.
This may not have been NATO’s finest logistical decision.
Tax-Free Paradise
Our squadron had its own bar, a converted barrack room with nothing fancy: just a bar, some stools, and a couple of tables.
I don’t remember if it was open every night, but I know it was open over the weekends, sometimes more or less continuously, depending on how long the stocks lasted and how determined everyone was to test the structural limits of the human liver.
When we were in barracks, there was always a Happy Hour on Fridays.
It usually started around 4 p.m. and ended sometime on Sunday morning.
“Hour” was doing a lot of work there.
Learning My Limits
I had never been much of a drinker.
I enjoyed a pint or two and sometimes overdid things, only to find myself later having a frank and personal conversation with a toilet bowl. A couple of visits to the Squadron Bar were enough to put me off making it a regular habit.
Some of the single lads in the squadron took drinking to a whole new level.
There was the fairly common sight of unconscious soldiers lying or sitting in pools of their own vomit. There were also the drunken dares.
One I witnessed involved drinking a glass of someone else’s piss.
A worse one involved a sock, somebody else’s vomit, and a pint glass. I shall spare you the engineering details, except to say that I still feel slightly ill remembering it.
This was not so much drinking culture as biological warfare with bar stools.
The Legend of Jock
Then there was the darkly humorous tale of Signalman J., better known as Jock.
Jock was a tough Glaswegian, a nasty piece of work, and a bully feared and hated by most of the younger lads in the squadron, including me. He had the sort of presence that made junior soldiers suddenly remember urgent business elsewhere.
In the early hours of one Saturday morning, Jock staggered into his room, effing and blinding and waking the other occupants.
They all pretended to be asleep.
This was wise.
What followed next was comedy gold, though not, I imagine, from Jock’s point of view.
The Great Defenestration
Jock’s bed was next to one of the room’s windows.
He decided it was too far to walk down the corridor to the toilet, so he climbed up onto the window sill.
These barracks had been built by the Germans before the war, and the window sills were very wide. I think there had once been some kind of double-glazing system fitted there, or perhaps German military architecture simply allowed for broader drunken decision-making surfaces.
Jock opened the window and started to undo his fly.
As he did this, he somehow got turned around.
He peed all over his own bed.
Then he zipped himself up, turned around again, and stepped out of the window.
He hit the ground with a resounding thump two storeys below.
Jock broke both his legs and, as far as I know, never returned to the squadron.
I cannot say morale collapsed.
The Official Investigation
That, at least, was the story given by the people interviewed by the Special Investigation Branch.
The SIB were not immediately enthusiastic about this explanation.
Men fell out of windows, certainly.
Men were helped out of windows.
Men were occasionally encouraged to explore gravity.
But voluntarily stepping out of one after urinating on one’s own bed required a certain amount of faith.
The witnesses pointed to the pee on the bed and floor.
Jock could not remember anything.
The SIB reluctantly had to accept their version of events.
Perhaps it is fortunate for some people that DNA testing was not a thing then.
Back then, pee was just pee.
Why Friday Nights Were Perfect for Invasion
The moral of the story?
If the Soviets had launched their attack on a Friday night, they might have found half the British Army of the Rhine unconscious in pools of their own vomit, and the other half trying to work out which end of their weapons was which.
This is, of course, a gross exaggeration.
Some people were on duty.
Some people were sober.
Some people probably even knew where their rifle was.
But not enough, I suspect, to make Friday night the ideal moment for NATO’s finest hour.
The free world’s defence against communist expansion was not entirely dependent on tax-free vodka, squadron bars, and the ability of young soldiers to remain vertical.
But for at least 60 hours every weekend, it sometimes felt worryingly close.