RTR Battlegroup deployment on Ex TALLINN DAWN, Germany

pair should deal with six enemy T-34s, four AT guns and supporting enemy infantry. An overwhelming task. Carius’s answer was to catch them in the flank and, with head up, observe and orientate his pair faster than his enemy. ‘Five T34s were already closing at full speed on the Rollbahn… a sixth had almost reached the ‘Kinderheim’ before we caught sight of it. But first I directed my attention to the five AT guns on the railway embankment which were threatening our flank. While my gunner was shooting it out with the Russian antitank guns, I looked to the left just at the right time. I discovered that the T34 had turned around when we showed up and was heading almost dead on towards Kerscher. The situation had reached critical mass. It was literally a question of seconds. We were lucky that the Russians had buttoned up as they always did and could not size the terrain up fast enough… Everything happened in the blink of an eye. Kerscher took care of the Russians with a direct hit. The remaining five T34s didn’t even get to fire.’ As those six T-34 commanders had learned the hard way, the only means of successfully fighting in close terrain is to be able to appreciate the situation faster than your enemy. This was another lesson that didn’t need to be reinforced with the modern-day crews, though not wanting to squash an unlucky dismounted colleague they had done almost all of their training head-up. However, the point is still valid, that the fundamentals of tank soldiering never change, being aware of the situation, how it’s changing and where the threat is orientated is something, we should always be cognisant of. The final lesson from Ex BADGER SCHOLAR was not a conceptual schooling in tank soldiering, but an education about the division that still exist in Estonian society. The not-so recent superpower conflict of the Second World War is remembered differently amongst Estonia’s divided ethnic populations, and this is still battled out on the Sinimae Hills. At the top of Grenadier Hill, the once formidable German defensive position, there is a monument to the German and Estonian SS who fought in the Battle of Narva whilst at the bottom of the hill is the Soviet cemetery containing 20,000 dead. Estonians fought on both sides of the battle, with ethnic Russian immigrants after the war complicating things further. Today the scars of this division are visible in the defacement of the German memorial; large vandal induced cracks in the granite marker stones contrast with the fresh flowers laid at their base. It is evident that conflict still remains about how to remember the past in this region – just as the soldiers of BADGER found it perplexing to view the battle from the perspective of a German tank ace, some Estonians still find it hard to accept the identify of their former enemy as countrymen. As long as these tensions remain the target of exploitation by vying superpowers the lessons learned by BADGER crews from Otto Carius and the Battle of Narva, 1944, will no doubt endure.