CDR Salamander doesn’t like the misunderstandings that cause commentators to identify NATO’s primary (but thankfully not militarily active) front as a “flank”:
For those who follow me on twitter/X, you are quite familiar with the meme I’ve been posting since long before the Russo-Ukrainian War, all the way back to at least 2018.
This misuse of the King’s English soon became a bur under my saddle as this error continued to be made. Seeing a trend, the following meme was generated by a friend;
This is not a new problem, and I know exactly where it comes from. In my years as a NATO Staff Officer, it did not take long to notice a twitch in the eye of many, not only Germans, to the mention of an “Eastern Front”. It seems silly, and in the 21st Century is it, but it is a reality.
I refused to play along. Yes, I understand how a very few highly emotional people can’t let go of their grandfather’s nightmares, but it is time for the adults in the room to just go around them. Anyway, this is the English language, and while there were French and Walloon Waffen SS units along with Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, and a few volunteer Spanish and others now on the NATO bench that fought on the Eastern Front in WWII, it doesn’t have the same impact with them as we don’t discuss such things in polite company.
Eastern Front, Front de l’Est, or Ostfront, we should all have moved along. History — and proper military terminology — have been around for centuries. In any event, it doesn’t bother the Russians one way or the other and you are fooling yourself if you think it does.
The use of “Eastern Flank” instead of “Front” where referring to real military threat to NATO, the Russian Federation, is just childish.
