Introduction

The following introduction is as provided by Tankograd Publishing
A focal point during the Cold War was situated along the inner German border in the area between Hesse and Thuringia. Known as the Fulda Gap, East German territory extended farthest into West Germany in this area. Recent research has demonstrated that the risk of conventional war in this region was in fact extremely high. It was this scenario that served as background for the autumn Exercise Constant Enforcer conducted by NATO's CENTAG in 1979.

The field training exercise Constant Enforcer was designed as an inter-corps coordination exercise. The main aim was to train cooperation between two NATO corps of different nationalities at the point where their areas of responsibility would join along the forward line of their troops. This included training in the coordination of different types of command procedures, the development of common tactics and technical procedures, providing logistical support, and the identification of friction points that resulted from cooperation along the boundary between two corps.

This publication describes Constant Enforcer 79 using maps and numerous hitherto unpublished exercise photographs primarily of vehicles of the US Army, but also of vehicles of the Canadian and Belgian armies.

Review

This release by Tankograd Publishing is a duel language offering in German and English, German on the left of the page and English on the right. The font used is a good choice as it makes reading easy and it is also of a reasonable size. The text covers six pages and does a fair to good job of explaining the scope and purpose of the exercise, it also breaks down the various phases of the exercise and this text does a good job of making these war games understandable by everyone including those that have not served. While the text proper only utilises six pages it should be mentioned that the photographs in the book are accompanied with good captions, these captions clearly identify what you are looking at, and are also provided in a duel language format.

Moving onto the photographs in this title; I have to say that I am very pleased with the mix of images in this title from Tankograd Publishing, the main reason for this is that they are all good quality images and do not have the fuzzy look of many colour images of the 1970’s and 80’s. There is a good mix of armour and soft skinned vehicles and also wheeled and tracked offerings. The images that may prove of most interests to modellers cover the Gama Goat (Tamiya) and the M60 A1 and A2 (AFV Club). You will not be surprised to hear that American made hardware gets the most coverage in this title, but not always in ownership of the Americans, that said there are appearances of German leopards which is good to see. I was pleased that Tankograd Publishing when selecting images for this title look to have considered a mix of scenes which has added interest for the modeller. The vehicles represented are shown both in the field and on hard standing, in addition to this there are also a number of photographs that show vehicles in a state of being repaired in the field.

Conclusion

These books that look at Cold War exercises can be a very good reference resource for the modeller, I do accept that colour photographs of this period are often ‘fuzzy’ to look at and I am happy to say that this is not an issue in this offering. This title provides good quality period images of US vehicles and the M60 A1 which should be of interest to anyone who has splashed out on the AFV Club model specifically and others besides.