Chapter 3

As I got to it, a man stepped out of the shadows and asked, “Cab free?” I quipped, “Only if you can pay the fare!” and we both laughed at the code phrase as he got in the back.

“Mind if I leave this on the back seat with you?” “Not at all; plenty of room.” and I laid the case on the seat.

“Where to, sir?” I enquired. “Elmore Mansions, if you know the place.” “Indeed I do.”

I pretended to set my meter for the fare, then we set off. Half a mile later, he tapped my shoulder and said to me, “On second thoughts, drop me at the next corner. It is a bit late for me to be calling on a friend.”

I slowed and stopped. “Here you are, sir. That will be a pound, as my minimum fare.” He handed me a pound coin and got out, carrying the suitcase with him.

“Thanks”, he said, and I told him as I placed a finger to my peaked hat in salute, “Just doing my job, sir,” and he chuckled at this double meaning as he strode off. I moved off to park the cab where I had found it, switched off and got out. I sat the ignition key on top of the front tyre, out of sight, knowing someone else would be taking away the cab within a few minutes.

I then headed to my favourite furniture store for a good night’s kip, wondering why that had all gone so easily and that I hadn’t really needed most of my skills to get it done. I was probably chosen for this job to see if I would carry it out efficiently. That made me suspect that a tougher challenge was on the way

Next day I was enjoying my freedom when my phone demanded my attention. I thought it was going to be Smith, but it was Phemie bothering me again.

“Mr Jones? Alec?” “Yes.” “Can I beg your help again? Come and do your talk about weapons, please; the boys in particular would love to hear what you have to say, though I suspect it will not be exactly what they expect.”

“When do you need me, Phemie? What are the choices?” She rattled off her schedule for that class, and I told her which day and time suited me best. In reality, all of them were fine, but I wanted to keep up the fiction of me being a busy man.

That fixed, she asked about my health, and whether I was eating well, and was there anything she could offer me apart from another home-cooked meal. I had to think about that offer, for it had undertones of something more personal, as did her concern about my health and eating pattern, so I plumped for the meal as my stated choice. That was always welcome and she could read into it whatever she liked. I was not willing to commit in words to anything more at the moment.

I now had to work on what I was going to say to her kids, with a particular slant to the boys with a military idea for their future. They needed to hear a bit of reality once again. What was needed primarily was to get them to think about getting better educated at school. That would be more beneficial for them in the long run, soldiering or not. I had to get them thinking about what they really wanted out of life, and first of all, the soldier’s option: to live or die.

Weapons now, how to start? To begin with, I had to get over that the best weapon a soldier has is his brain; thinking of what makes most sense in the facts of warfare. Dying quickly is not a good choice, not is dying slowly through being injured stupidly. I had to make this clear and unambiguous. After some more cogitation, I had my outline and then had to flesh it out. When I at last took my place in front of the class, I was ready.

“Good day, ladies and gentlemen. I call you that as we are going to talk as adult to adult. War is not child’s play; it is a serious matter of life and death. Today’s talk is about weapons: the tools of war; what you need in order to win. The most dangerous weapon, and the most effective in battle, you already have in your possession: it is your brain. Think about this: An SAS patrol of four men can go into a conflict zone for several weeks and return to base with the mission successful, but without firing a single shot, and the enemy not even knowing they were there! The reason for this is simple: most patrols are intelligence-gathering tasks, learning as much as possible about the enemy you face, what numbers they have, what equipment they have, what training standard do they have; what are the local water supplies, where are they, and if there are any civilians around, do they favour the enemy or simply want rid of them? That is what these soldiers’ job is, among other tasks such as not being seen. Every single one of these questions are vital for your future fighting with the enemy. Obtaining the information usually involves locating an observation site and creating a hide from which to watch the enemy. Usually this means digging a hole deep enough to lie in and cover with brushwood to make it appear that the site is undisturbed. This means the dirt you dig out has to be dumped a good distance away, so as not to show that someone was digging, so you have to be prepared to dig dirt and carry it away a fair distance before scattering it about at random. You also have to be prepared to lie there without moving for hours or even days at a time, in all sorts of weather, so first you make sure your hideout will not become waterlogged through a bad choice of site. You have to be clever enough to think about all these matters before you start. Use your brain: don’t try digging in a rock slide, or a forest full of tree roots, or a swamp. So, you are thinking, what about weapons to use to defeat the enemy? The simplest answer is that everything can become a weapon, if used in the right circumstances. It is not a matter of technology, but utility. In the darkness of the night, a sharp knife is far more effective and silent than the biggest and baddest gun, for a silencer is not totally silent over a short distance. In a hand-to-hand fight with an enemy soldier, a handful of dust or dirt thrown towards the eyes can be just as effective as a punch, for in trying to protect his eyes, the enemy opens himself to attacks on other parts of the body. The same principle is used in fighting on a large scale. For instance, make the enemy think you are planning a direct assault, but hit him from the side: a flank attack. You should always plan ahead for any battle, and aim to be the one who dictates how the battle is fought. That control gives you a massive advantage. Getting back to intelligence, you can fight better if you know where the enemy is, how his forces are distributed, and in what state of readiness that force is. The best time to attack is when the enemy is not ready to fight. Once you know where the enemy is, his disposition and what he has to fight with, you plan your own offensive accordingly, using whichever weapons in your armoury is best for the job. If you can maneouvre your forces and he is unable to do the same, that gives you an extra advantage. Note that this is the decision of the general and his planning staff, so what to you as a soldier on the ground may seem silly is often part of that strategy and that simply you don’t see the overall plan. At other times the general may be a fool, and that has happened in the past when military knowledge was less important than political or social rank, and his planners can’t stop him making bad decisions. You are in a rough place then. Russian Soviet doctrine was to use mass infantry assaults to gain ground, and the personnel losses incurred never seemed to come into their calculations. Modern military planners in the West value their troops much more. The wise general knows how much effort is put into training these soldiers, so it is daft to allow them to die simply for a piece of ground. Let me disabuse you of another piece of wrong thinking. It is never a case that a more powerful weapon is better than a less powerful weapon; never. It is always WHICH weapon is best suited for a particular task. In a large-scale battle – anything more than a skirmish, a commander is best to use cheap and accurate weapons that are good at taking out expensive kit like a tank. The Ukrainians proved that very effectively, killing million-dollar tanks with man-held missiles costing a few thousand, and at a distance and often hidden, so that the tank commander can’t see where the missile is coming from until it hits. The shoulder-fired missile takes two minimally-trained men to operate, but a tank crew of three or four need months of training to operate their vehicle to its best, so the enemy also often lose a trained tank crew as well as the tank. Warfare is thus not a calculation of number of weapons and their quality, though high quality and modernity is often superior to an older out-dated weapon, and that goes especially for tanks. In the Iraq wars, the British and American tanks out-ranged the Russian-supplied Iraqi tanks, and were also more accurate: mostly one fire, one hit. Warfare is a combination of tactical advantage, positional advantage – high ground is traditionally more helpful as your shell, bullet, or mortar can fire further on a down slope trajectory. Numerical advantage in troops and equipment is not always important, only when it can be applied at a particular point. Battles have been lost by a numerically superior army at a bridge, due to the limits of troops that can cross at one time. Defending a bridge is easier than attacking it. The defenders can cut down the attackers as they try to cross, and their dead bodies then block the reserves from following. If the pressure gets too high, you can have the bridge primed to be exploded at a critical juncture, making the situation even worse for the so-called superior attacking force. However, the most valuable weapon for any army is what we call logistics; the part of the army that provides supplies to the fighting men at the front. With good logistics, you don’t run out of ammunition, food or water. In history it was a baggage train of carts carrying everything you needed; nowadays it is the columns of hundreds of military trucks carrying everything an army needs to fight with. That means ammunition, fuel for your vehicles, water trucks so that you don’t go thirsty, food supplies of all kinds, not just the ready to eat packs that you may have heard of. These are fine in a pinch, where you have to make your own food, but getting decent food from an army kitchen is much better in every way despite past tales. A soldier who is a good chef is much appreciated by the other soldiers, so you can train as a chef and be welcomed into the army. I recall a description of an American supply column heading for the front lines in Iraq. The reporter told of seeing hundreds of trucks stretching bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see; miles and miles into the distance. They were carrying an immense amount of materiel for the attack; the essentials for an army to fight. An armoured brigade often has its own supply vehicles bringing a constant stream of ammunition for their guns, so the tanks can fire until empty, and the ammunition truck would be right behind them whenever needed. Hand weapons is really what you will expect to be using, and experience soon tells a soldier whether his weapon is good or not. It does not matter much if it can fire a few metres further than another rifle, or be trifle more accurate in a hit. What matters most is: will it jam easily or work well in almost all conditions? A gun that jams becomes just an expensive club and not much use in battle, so you want one that works! The most popular military gun in the world is the old Russian AK-47 assault rifle. It was roughly made, with very little precision in its parts, but it is cheap to make, it almost always works in any conditions; winter or summer, dry or wet, a dust storm or thick mud, and that is what endears it to insurgent forces around the world, most of whom have no military training so need a weapon that is simple to use. There were at least seventy-five million of these AK-47 guns made since it was designed in 1947 and it remains the second-best assault gun around. It lost its top spot to the American M16 which was designed in 1957, so almost as old. The M16 was more costly to make, but it is precision-built, light-weight and very effective, after early bugs in use were sorted out. A lighter gun meant the soldier could carry more ammunition, and about 8 million of these weapons were made. Britain has not had a such a good record in producing a reliable automatic rifle since the Czech-designed Bren gun, but I am not going to talk about that as I am still a serving soldier. Fast-firing weapons are the machine guns of various types. The first fully-automated machine gun was the Maxim gun, invented in 1884, and its inventor thought it was so devastating that wars would stop forever, but humans were too stupid to see that option, and went on to slaughter millions with it and its derivatives ever since. The effectiveness of earlier, less efficient, 1862 Gatling gun, basically a circle of rifle barrels fired one after the other, was evident in the American civil war, and the Germans adopted the idea of a rapid-firing weapon for their own use. The British military dismissed the American evidence as it happened in a ‘colonial civil war’, and so was assumed to be irrelevant by the time the First World War came along in 1914. Thousands of British soldiers died from machine-gun attacks before the generals were forced to accept a changed reality and revise their planning for future attacks. Much bigger guns are basically long-range weapons with a single large heavy bullet called a shell, and until fairly recently were not very accurate, so their shells were fired in groups into a general area. Think of WW1 battlefields which were a maelstrom of craters all over the place. That explosive conflagration used up millions of shells on both sides, and was very wasteful. Unfortunately they still remained effective at killing soldiers, but indiscriminately. It taught the value of deep trenches for protection. In modern wars, many more men die from artillery strikes than from bullets, and only in recent years have artillery guns been made so accurate in their delivery that they can hit a specific spot within a metre or two. Your only defence to artillery is to dig in and be underground, sheltered from the murderous shrapnel. Shrapnel is what kills most soldiers – metal chunks flying at speed – so that is what you must avoid. Shrapnel kills more men than it maims. Similarly inside a tank is not a safe place to be. Tank killer weapons cause pieces of metal to fly off the inside of the tank, and that kills the crew, if the fire that follows doesn’t. If your tank gets hit, you get out sharpish, or die. In effect, stupidity is what kills; if you don’t act cleverly, despite knowing all the ways you can die, choosing to act stupidly is almost certainly how to kill yourself. It is the clever guys that survive, not the brave ones, and if you are clever, you learn everything you can. History teaches you what works and what doesn’t. Science tells you facts about chemicals and equipment, but it is the soldier who has to make them work in the battleground, and the more you know about the science, the better you can apply that knowledge to the fighting. At times, you can learn through reading history about things like germ warfare, which was inadvertently and unknowingly applied long before anyone recognised it for what it was. This was the most important factor in the conquest of South America by the Spanish in the early 1500s. With only 300 men, Cortes toppled the great Incan empire. His obvious weapons were primarily their horses, which the locals had never seen before, plus guile – cheating in war by capturing the king and massacring his guards. As the Incas were a theocracy – religion and their chief ruling all their actions – the locals did not know what to do once their leader was under Cortes’s control, and so Cortes and his men could do what they liked. The Spaniards assumed they were so powerful that the Indians just ran away. The natives didn’t run away; they died instead from diseases like smallpox, in droves, in the months and years ahead. This was germ warfare on the grand scale. What the Spaniards had no idea about, is what they themselves did to the locals by their very presence among them. These Europeans arrived with disease germs inside them, having become immune to these diseases through centuries of exposure, but they accidentally passed their germs to the local population who had never encountered such diseases before. The locals died in their thousands at first, and later in their millions, without the Spaniards physically needing to lay a hand on them. When travellers went into assumed unexplored regions centuries later, they found only a few natives in scattered small tribes, but mostly forest, so naturally they assumed this was virgin forest. It was in fact trees that had grown for hundreds of years since the Amerindian population were massacred by European diseases, and those few natives were all that was left. So guns and military power are not always the main cause of devastation. H.G.Wells wrote a novel in 1897 about a Martian invasion of Earth, and the all-conquering alien Martians are eventually killed off by our local microbes. Wells had defined the answer to South America’s puzzling lack of population, but did not know it. Japan tried to apply germ warfare to their war with the USA, but the war was over before they could implement it. They had tried germ warfare in their invasion of China, dropping cardboard boxes of infected insects from aeroplanes, and it worked for a while. They had discovered the Jet Stream of fast-moving air in our atmosphere – science again – and used it to send war balloons to the USA to drop anti-personnel mines on the country. Most balloons failed to arrive or landed in empty countryside, but Japan’s military didn’t know what the outcome was, and they planned to follow it up with germ bombs next. The atomic bomb came to them first, and finished the conflict. War can be hell, and not just for the soldiers. Always remember that.