CRACK British troops built a river crossing in minutes after seeing soldiers slaughtered when similar drills go wrong in war.
The exercise in Poland was part of Nato’s largest war game since the end of the Cold War.
Challenger 2 tanks joined hundreds of armoured vehicles crossing the Drawa River on British amphibious barges.
Royal Engineers took 18 minutes to launch a dozen M3 Rigs – trucks that turn into barges – and lash them together to form ferries.
Each ferry carries up to 190 tons of cargo – or two fully loaded Challenger 2 tanks.
It comes after Russia lost countless troops and armoured vehicles when a crossing was hit by Ukraine’s artillery.
READ MORE ON ARMED FORCES
Major Ryan Ingram, boss of the 23 Amphibious Engineer Squadron, said: “The Russians got it wrong.
“We want to be in and out before we are even seen.”
His barges took 45 seconds to cross the 500ft wide river.
If they came under fire in a conflict the ferries would separate, scatter and hide along the riverbank within minutes.
Maj Ingram added: “The key is not being seen, speed and manoeuvrability.
3
3
“What happened in Ukraine has allowed us to understand ways we can be better.
“You can always learn from others’ mistakes.”
The Brits haven’t used the Army barges to cross a river in conflict since 2004, on the Shat al Arab waterway in Iraq.
But with almost 2,000 rivers across Northern Europe – a drumbeat of warnings or war – Maj Ingram said the barges were key to the Army’s ability to fight a peer enemy.
The troops were backed by HVM Stormer air defence vehicles – armed with Starstreak missiles – to protect the crossing from missile attacks.
Quarter Master Surej Rana said: “This is our bread and butter.”
Brigadier Henry Searby, commander of 12 Brigade Armoured Combat Team, said the war in neighbouring Ukraine had focused soldiers’ minds.
Asked if they might have to do it for real, he said: “It’s in the back of every single soldiers mind, 100 per cent.”
He said training for large scale war felt “different” to the Army’s counter insurgency focus over the last 20 years.
He said: “The bulk of my career has been spent in an era of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations.
“Those have different demands, different tactics, different capabilities, different parts of the world doing different kinds of missions.
“What we’re doing here is exercising the of war fighting end of the spectrum.”
But he insisted that was the Army’s main job.
He said: “War fighting is ultimately what we’re all paid to take part in it.”
Many of the soldiers The Sun spoke to had seen footage from the war in Ukraine of a doomed Russian river crossing in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas.
Russians also tried and failed to build a pontoon bridge in Kherson to speed up their retreat.
Ukraine suffered losses when amphibious assaults ran into an ambush on the coast of Crimea.
A team of special forces were shot dead in a speed boat as they reached the beach.
The Poland drills were designed to test the British Army’s ability to move thousands of troops and hundreds of vehicles over sea and land across Europe.
It comes after the head of the US Army warned Britain must be prepared to “war fight at scale”.
General Randy George warned America would not be able to plug gaps in Britain’s armed forces in the event of an all out war.
But American Army Captain Joel Self, commander of the US bridging company, conceded: “The British rigs are built for speed.
“They can build it and get traffic across as fast as possible.”
He said one strength of a US pontoon bridge was that the sections could be flown in by helicopter.
And he claimed it could anchor into less stable banks than the Anglo-German M3 system.
Maj Ingram, commander of the UK barges, said a bridge was a “nice juicy target.”
Some 90,000 Nato troops, including 16,000 Brits, are taking part in Steadfast Defender, a massive show of force to deter a conflict with Russia.
