Tom, I know so well of the documents of which you speak – or rather, not dissimilar iterations. Please forgive and yet permit me a thread hijack!
A little further up the food chain, that is at Army Group, I resided (on exercise) in what was known as the Cosmic Top-Secret registry; basically, anything to do with CTS was all about nuclear weapons, and, well, how to put it? More or less the nuclear destruction of eastern Germany, any western bits which we may not have been able to hold, and a fair chunk of western Russia to take care of those pesky reinforcement units. Oh, and probably lighting up Poland on the way.
I never had either the time, or really the inclination to study what I was custodian of; to be honest, pages and pages of target data, burst heights and fuse details probably wouldn’t have meant much to me, besides, I was slightly more interested in the WAAF I was destined to work with.
My normal day job within the Army Group HQ, and frankly, one I detested, was as 50% of the G1/G5/CCP Typing Pool. Yup – typing pool. There I was, fresh from a Divisional HQ in southern UK, always on exercise in Denmark or Schleswig-Holstein, having risen from Private to full Corporal during my what, 3-year tenure there, bursting at the seams with enthusiasm (probably too much so as I’m sure it manifested itself in a certain cockiness and mouthiness – not unique amongst young Corporals perhaps?), posted back to Germany which I loved, and I’m put in the bloody typing pool. It had its moments; my counterpart was a Belgian Para Commando called Jules. As the 2 official NATO languages are French and English, he did all the French stuff, and me the English. Apart from making me a passive smoker, he was quite good fun, keen to improve his English and replete with hair-curling tales of massacres in the Congo.
My mobilization role though was much more interesting, even as I say, I didn’t really have time to “enjoy” if that’s the right word, the subject matter.
HQ NORTHAG split into two HQs upon the balloon going up: Static, and Mobile. The Static War HQ (SWHQ) was set up in a cave system which began military life in the hands of the Romans; the Germans tarted it all up a bit and used it for the production of V weapons in WW2, and then in the late 40s/early 50s, NATO added concrete, cabling, lighting, heating, air-conditioning, cookhouse, bar, well, you get the picture. It also had living accommodation for the great and the good, and when not used for exercise was manned by the respective nations from HQ TWOATAF (2nd Allied Tactical Air Force), our air counterpart HQ. The constituent nations being Brits, Dutch, Germans and Belgians; we were due US reinforcements too and as ever, we had the nuclear surety teams co-located.
I was assigned to the joint CTS Registry; this was run really by the TWOATAF bods, which in this case consisted of an RAF Flight Sergeant, and a female WRAF full Corporal equivalent, and, on exercise or the real thing, me folks.
Now, I may have thought that typing was boring, and in the G1/G5 world it was, but I had not reckoned on the stifling aspects of document security when it came to such high-grade material. There were the normal document registers, and the NATO ones were more or less the same as the Brit ones I was a Ninja on, after all, a register is a register. But, with CTS stuff, before handing it over to the requesting staff branches, the document had to be page-counted, there and then, whilst the hapless requesting Clerk stood twiddling his thumbs the other side of the security grill. Once that had been done, he signed for it, and off he went back to his staff cell – normally G3 Special Weapons or G3 Plans. Once they’d finished with it, whatever iteration of document it was, it was brought back, and had to be page counted again. Now, if a document say, consisted of 25, or 50 pages, all well and good, not too much of a chore, but some of these times were inches thick, with separate annexures and appendices, which are all page-numbered differently, so a far from straightforward task.
At the end of each shift, we normally worked 12 on, 12 off, the whole Registry’s holdings had to be checked before handover; if documents were still absent, receipts or signatures all had to be reconciled. All this could easily eat into your down time as it could take up to 2 hours or so; this had implications in that one then missed the transport to take one over the border to a Belgian Army barracks at Tongeren, where us lesser mortals resided. SNCOs and above, and all the bloody girls on exercise, were all billeted in hotels in Maastricht!
So that was me on exercise, more or less, for 7 days or so; sometimes, it was quite eerie, in that there was a speaker system throughout most of the Staff cells and one could listen to the Corps Commanders report in twice a day, to the Army Group Commander. Often these would include the number of nuclear strikes received in a Corps area. I should just point out that the exercise scenarios were extremely well written and pretty realistic, or at least up to a point.
The accountability of the CTS documents didn’t end with the exercise finishing; we had to decamp back to the massive HQ at Rheindahlen, where the documents had to be checked in back to their peace-time registries – NORTHAF and TWOATAF respectively, and this involved, yes, you’ve guessed it, endless page counting. Every last document had to be page-counted. The number of documents had to be in at least 3 figures, and in my case, there were 2 x SNCOs and me, in the NORTHAG Registry, sat surrounded by piles of documents, counting away, while the rest of the military world was showered, changed and drinking their own body-weight in beer – exercises always ended on a Friday afternoon.
There was a quirk in all this: the senior officer responsible for security, in this case a British Brigadier, could not go home himself, until we reported to him that Alles was indeed, in Ordnung, and he in turn had to report that to COSNORTHAG (a German Major General). This particular Brigadier was impatient, and at times obnoxious; (quelle surprise) he learned the hard way not to interrupt the Clerks when they were counting, viz the following interchange:
Busy Staff Sergeant (or even me): “Two hundred and thirty nine, two hundred and forty…”
Testy Brigadier: “For Chrissake Staff how much longer is this going to take?”
Busy Staff Sergeant: “Sigh; one, two….”
As I say Tom, apologies for the hijack, and I know this is dull stuff, but then a lot of Army stuff is dull stuff(!)
