First clash: Combat close-up in World War Three

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 show more 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. show less

Fictional account of 4CMBG in World War III. Hard to follow at times due to poor maps and acronym soup, but a very good account of a battle that never happened.

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