Chieftains Read Online Free PDF

obey orders, and keep our heads down.'
     
    'My dad was in the last war,' said Shadwell, in an attempt to prolong the conversation. 'RASC. He got one home leave from Egypt in three years. Three bloody years, Sarge.' It seemed like a lifetime to the young loader.
     
    'This war won't last more than a few days.'
     
    'Just so long as I get a crack at a T-80,' said Inkester. 'Just one T-80 in my sight, broadside on...I dream of them, Sarge. A whole long row of them silhouetted on a skyline, moving along like ducks in a shooting gallery. Pop...pop...pop...there they go. Magic!'
     
    The radio crackled. Sergeant Davis adjusted his headset, pulling it down tighter over his beret. 'All stations Charlie Bravo, this is Charlie Bravo Nine.' The troop leader's voice was penetrating. 'Stand to, and prepare for action. Load Hesh, and keep to your own arcs. Out.'
     
    Davis acknowledged, and then switched on the Chieftain's Tannoy. 'Okay, lads, stand to. Shadwell, load Hesh.' He didn't give them time to question him. 'It sounds like we've got a war...'
     
    Inkester's voice was pitched high with surprise: 'Christ!'
     
    'Now take it easy...all of you. Inkester, no itchy fingers, wait for your orders. If someone's going to start something, it's not going to be Bravo Two.'
     
    'Loaded,' bellowed Shadwell, his voice cutting through the still air.
     
    'You daft pillock,' complained Inkester, loudly. 'You bloody near deafened me! We all watched you load a minute ago.'
     
    'Shut up,' said Davis. 'Keep your eyes open, and stay alert. Hewett, everything okay your end?'
     
    DeeJay revved the engine slightly and checked his gauges. 'It all looks good, Sarge.'
     
    'Keep it that way.' Davis dimmed out the compartment lights and leant his head back against the rest. He reached out and touched the steel of the turret with his fingertips. It was cold, damp with the condensation of the crew's breath. He could feel the throb of the engine. Bravo Two! She was a good tank, reliable, responsive to the treatment she received from her crew. He remembered being told how it had been when the cavalry regiments lost their horses before the start of World War Two – men had wept as their mounts had been led away to be replaced by armoured vehicles. If the situation were reversed, Davis thought, he would have identical feelings...you got to know a vehicle, trust it, understand its likes and dislikes. He had never owned a horse, but three-quarters of a million pounds worth of Chieflain took some beating. The womb-like darkness and security of Bravo Two's fighting compartment was comforting.
     

THREE
     
    Any doubts which were in the mind of Captain Mick Fellows of the Royal Tank Regiment concerned not the rapidly developing situation, but the sanity of being placed in his present position by a foreign commanding officer. He felt sure the scheme in which he and his small unit of Rarden-armed Scimitars were involved, on detachment to the Armoured Infantry Division of the 1st German Corps, must have been devised by a lunatic with no concern whatsoever for the lives of his men.
     
    Officially, Captain Fellows' troop was known as a 'stay-behind-unit'. There were others, mostly infantry. Their job was to remain in concealment until the first echelons of an enemy attack had passed, and then to harrass and disrupt the logistics columns or communications wherever possible. That was fair enough, sensible tactics, but the German commander had, in Fellows' opinion, allowed his enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare to obscure the impracticability of the plans he had developed for a unit whose normal duties were reconnaissance.
     
    Mick Fellows was waiting with his Scimitar troop in a concrete bunker within a kilometer of the East German border, in dense pine woods between the villages of Bahrdorf and Rickensdorf to the south-east of Wolfsbug. His German commander's belief was that any major Soviet assault in his sector would have as its centre-line the autobahn which ran from