The Baltic is delighted to be a NATO lake

Soaking upthe NATO NATO midsummer sun at Lazy Beach, a stripe of white sand as delicious as its name, Charlemagne was blissfully unaware of a looming danger. Alarmingly near to this idyll on the Polish shore of the Baltic Sea the armies of four hostile eastern states—Cinereus, Griseus, Murinus and Plumbeus—had stormed into central Germany. Spearheaded by commandos of the notorious Brückner organisation, the invading horde was now thundering north towards the Baltic. Even as pale flesh pinkened, children splashed and a breeze tickled the tall pines in the forest behind the Lazy dunes (in fact it has a crossed L, so the proper pronunciation of Plaża Łazy is PLAH-zha WAH-zi), some 250 warplanes roared into the cerulean heavens to smash the intruders.The invasion was, of course, a fantasy, though not of Charlemagne’s making. It was ’s own boffins who conjured up this imaginary invasion, setting the scene for a giant war game. Staged across northern Germany in mid-June and involving some 10,000 airmen from 25 countries, Air Defender 23 was the alliance’s biggest-ever air exercise.