Cauldron

by Larry Bond

  Even as its first tank columns rumbled toward the Polish frontier, EurCon’s sophisticated orbital “eyes” had been blinded.

  CHAPTER 19

  Movement to Contact

  JUNE 5 — HEADQUARTERS, 19TH PANZERGRENADIER BRIGADE, COTTBUS, GERMANY

  Lights were on all across the compound, bright against a pale black, starlit sky. Although it was already past midnight, the officers and men of the 19th Panzergrenadier Brigade were still up, readying their weapons and vehicles for war. Work details crowded around canvas-sided trucks, hurriedly off-loading crates containing ammunition, rations, and spare parts. Company and platoon officers and NCOs circulated through the stacked crates, ready to pounce on supplies their units still lacked. Shortages were the rule rather than the exception.

  When the shooting started at sea on June 3, the brigade was strung out across Germany, caught right in the middle of its accelerated redeployment to Cottbus. Some units had already been moving into their new quarters, though “new” was definitely the wrong word to use for ramshackle barracks built in 1945 to house Soviet occupation forces. Other battalions had still been stuck in their old cantonments around Ahlen, waiting for their turn on Germany’s clogged rail lines and autobahns. They’d reached Cottbus the day before, spurred by a preliminary war warning order from II Corps headquarters. Moving the hundreds of tons of stores they would need for sustained combat was proving considerably more difficult.

  Lieutenant Colonel Willi von Seelow frowned as he stood looking out a window in the brigade commander’s spartan office. He and the rest of the staff had been working hard for several days to remedy the chaotic supply situation. Now they were out of time. Despite their best efforts, the 19th would go into battle with barely fifty percent of the ammo, food, and fuel stocks he considered essential.

  From what he’d heard, few units in the Confederation’s newly integrated army were in better shape. A logistical system already showing the strain of the army’s hasty redeployment to the Polish border and the heavy fighting in Hungary was starting to fall apart.

  Von Seelow shook his head angrily. It was one thing for senior officers and government leaders to talk blithely about conducting a “come as you are” war. It was quite another to actually fight one — especially with half your supplies still locked up in warehouses four hundred kilometers behind the likely front line.

  He turned away from the window when the phone on Colonel Georg Bremer’s desk rang.

  “Bremer here.”

  Von Seelow watched his short, dark-haired commander sit up straighter.

  “Yes, Herr General.” Bremer listened intently to the voice on the other end for a few moments, jotting down notes all the while. When he put the pencil down, his face was more serious than von Seelow had ever seen it. “Yes, sir. I understand completely. You can count on us. Thank you, Herr General. And good luck to you, too.”

  He replaced the receiver and then looked up. “That was Leibnitz.”

  Von Seelow nodded. Gen. Karl Leibnitz commanded the 7th Panzer Division, the brigade’s parent formation.

  “It’s official.” Bremer stood up from behind his desk and tugged his uniform jacket straight. “We cross into Poland at 0400 hours today. The plan is ‘Summer Lightning.’ “

  Von Seelow felt cold. As relations with Poland and the Czech Republic worsened, the army’s general staff had prepared several contingency plans for operations along Germany’s eastern border. Summer Lightning was the most ambitious of them all. Naturally, as the brigade’s operations officer, he’d studied each plan in detail. But he’d never really expected to see any of them put into practice — not even when the crisis began heating up. Somehow, he’d always believed cooler heads and common sense would ultimately prevail.

  Under Summer Lightning, two full EurCon corps, the II and III, would attack across the Neisse River south of the city of Frankfurt. Together, the two corps could mass fourteen hundred main battle tanks, nearly a thousand armored personnel carriers, and six hundred artillery pieces — all manned by 120,000 tough, highly trained soldiers. They would be supported by fighter-bombers and more than one hundred attack helicopters.

  Three more French and German divisions, EurCon’s I Corps, would feint along the Oder River north of Frankfurt. With luck, they would tie down the Polish troops deployed there. At the same time, the VI Corps and several Austrian units would conduct probing attacks to pin the small but formidable Czech Army in place. EurCon’s V Corps, with two German panzer divisions, would remain in reserve in central Germany.

  If all went well, the six divisions in II and III Corps would easily punch a hole through the two Polish mechanized divisions they faced. But to what end?

  He put the question into words. “And our strategic objective?”

  “To ‘punish’ the Polish armed forces.” Bremer shrugged. “Whatever the devil that means.”

  Von Seelow didn’t like the sound of that at all. Without a clear military or political goal, they could easily wind up flailing wildly about inside Poland, wasting precious strength and time pursuing an elusive victory nobody could define.

  Bremer saw his uncertainty and nodded. “I don’t like it much, either. But at least our part in all this is clear enough.” He smiled thinly. “So now we try putting this wild-eyed scheme of yours into practice, Willi.”

  Army-level plans like Summer Lightning laid out only the broad outlines of a campaign. Operations officers like von Seelow were responsible for crafting the detailed brigade-, division-, and corps-level plans needed to implement their superiors’ grand schemes. II Corps’ current ops plan was largely based on concepts he had evolved during staff exercises earlier in the year.

  The knowledge that his bold ideas were about to be tested under fire stirred contradictory emotions. As a soldier, he felt proud that his abilities were finally being recognized by his comrades and by his superiors. At the same time, he couldn’t shake a nagging belief that this war was fundamentally unjust. He’d read and heard enough unfiltered news to know the kinds of pressure the French and many Germans had been applying against Poland and the other small countries in Eastern Europe.

  Bremer must have been thinking along somewhat the same lines. “At least we have one consolation. We are soldiers, not politicians. We need only do our duty and let the vote-buyers sort out the rest, eh?”

  But Willi von Seelow was not so sure of that. The professional soldiers who had served the Third Reich had also held firm to their duty. They had been wrong. Duty must always be measured against the demands of individual conscience, he thought. Ultimately all soldiers, especially those in command positions, are called on to decide whether or not they are fighting a just or an unjust war.

  His superiors, both in the army and in the government, were entitled to the presumption that their decisions met those tests, but he couldn’t help feeling uneasy. The Chancellor’s declaration of martial law had seemed a necessary, though harsh emergency measure at first. As the months passed, though, Willi couldn’t help noticing that laws and methods of governing enacted as temporary seemed increasingly regarded as permanent. That worried him. As a young officer, he’d served one dictatorship, however unwillingly. He did not want to serve another.

  Two hours later, the 19th Panzergrenadier Brigade was on the road, a long, blacked-out column of tanks and APCs slowly clanking east toward the border town of Forst. Their route took them through tiny, run-down villages and patches of dead or dying forest. The vast, open-pit brown coal mines that pockmarked the surrounding countryside had wreaked havoc on the local environment.

  Other tank and mechanized infantry units filled the roads behind them, funneling into Cottbus in columns that stretched for kilometer after kilometer. Most of EurCon’s II Corps was massing near the city, preparing for the lunge into Poland after a chosen few cleared the way.

  NEAR FORST, ON THE POLISH BORDER

  It was daybreak.

  Although the woods on the Polish side of the Neisse River were
still cloaked in shadow, the sun had already climbed above the horizon — a ball of fire rising in a cloudless sky. Red-tinged sunlight touched the rusting steel girders of the Forst railroad bridge and set them aglow. Light winds from the south and southeast promised warm and dry weather later in the day.

  Men in camouflage-pattern fatigues, combat engineers, swarmed over the railroad bridge, laying wood planking across its tracks and ties so that armored vehicles could use it safely. Other engineers, attached to the brigade by the 7th Panzer Division and II Corps, were busy deploying two ribbon bridges across the Neisse. They worked as fast as their self-propelled pontoon sections arrived and splashed into the water, bolting them together to form floating roadways reaching across the river.

  Clusters of armored vehicles dotted an open park just west of the bridging site. Gepard flakpanzers mounting radar-directed, 35mm guns were on watch in case the Polish Air Force made an unwelcome appearance over Forst. Longer-range Roland SAM batteries stood guard further back, outside the town.

  In the narrow streets of Forst itself, the 19th Panzergrenadier’s Marder APCs and Leopard tanks were lined up nose-to-tail, waiting to cross into Poland. Infantrymen wearing helmets and camouflage battle dress lay curled up beside their Marders. They were making use of the delay by trying to catch up on some of the sleep they’d lost during the previous night. Tank crewmen wearing olive-drab fatigues and black berets stood on top of their vehicles, using binoculars to scan the silent, wooded enemy shore.

  Several staff officers and NCOs chatted together near an American-made M577 command vehicle parked in a street overlooking the railway bridge. The boxy tracked vehicle served as the brigade’s TOC, its tactical operations center. Bent low to clear the M577’s low roof, von Seelow walked down the rear ramp and joined his subordinates. He stood blinking in sunshine that was painfully bright after a night spent cooped up inside the TOC’s map- and radio-filled compartment.

  “Any news, sir?”

  Von Seelow nodded. “Major Hauser assures me that his bridges will be completed on schedule, and that we’ll be crossing in half an hour. Since he is a punctual and punctilious man, I think we can count on his assurances.”

  His mild jest drew a laugh from those in earshot. A louder and longer laugh than it deserved, he noticed. Beneath their carefully assumed nonchalance, these young men were all nerves, frightened by the very real prospect of killing or being killed. No amount of riot control duty or street patrolling could compare with the sheer frightfulness of modern war.

  Von Seelow knew he should be feeling the same grating anxieties. Certainly he’d been scared enough under fire in the Balkans — caught between the warring Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. For some reason, though, this was different. He was still conscious of being afraid of death or failure, but his fears were buried deeper than he remembered them. Maybe it was because he had more control over events now than he’d had as a junior officer obeying other men’s orders. Maybe he was just too busy.

  Movement near the far end of the railway bridge caught his eye. With their hands held high in surrender, a steady trickle of disconsolate Polish infantrymen in their distinctive “worm” camouflage-pattern field uniforms came walking across, prodded at riflepoint by German soldiers whose faces and hands were daubed black.

  The Poles had been captured during the first and most dangerous phase of this river crossing. Crammed into flimsy rubber rafts, an infantry company from the 7th Panzer’s reconnaissance battalion had paddled silently across the Neisse before dawn. Once ashore, they’d overwhelmed a tiny Polish garrison posted in the little village of Zasieki to keep an eye on the railroad bridge. Together with a light infantry company from one of the division’s Jaeger battalions, the recon troops were now spread in a semicircle through the woods, guarding the bridgehead until the brigade’s heavy tanks and vehicles could relieve them.

  Willi had bet that this crossing point would be only weakly garrisoned, and he had won his bet. With just four divisions deployed along a border nearly four hundred kilometers long, the Poles were too thin on the ground to defend everywhere at once. In this sector, they’d concentrated their troops opposite the highway bridge at Olszyna, ten kilometers south. A German assault at Zasieki, with only a rudimentary road net and surrounded by forest, must not have seemed a significant threat.

  Von Seelow planned to show them they were wrong. Once across the Neisse, the 19th Panzergrenadier would sweep southeast along the railroad embankment and the woods themselves. The forest wasn’t old-growth. It lacked the dense, tangled undergrowth that would have rendered it impassable to vehicles. Movement would be made even easier by using some of the dirt logging tracks that crisscrossed the area. Most of them fed onto the highway near Olszyna. The brigade’s Leopards and Marders should hit the reinforced Polish battalion guarding the bridge from the flank and rear before its commander knew they were coming.

  7TH PANZER AUFKLARUNGS (RECONNAISSANCE) BATTALION, NEAR TUPLICE

  The 7th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance battalion prowled onward through the woods, advancing in a kilometer-wide wedge. Sunlight streamed down through the trees, splintered by gently swaying green leaves and branches into patches of light and shadow rippling over camouflaged hulls and gun turrets. Eight-wheeled Luchs scout cars roved ahead, probing for the first signs of stiffening Polish resistance. Tanks and six-wheeled Fuchs troop carriers followed a few hundred meters behind.

  Major Max Lauer rode proudly erect in the unbuttoned turret hatch of his Leopard 1 headquarters tank. Although they mounted smaller-caliber main guns and had less armor protection than the newer Leopard 2s, the thirty-six tanks under his command still gave his recon battalion a powerful punch. He and his men could fight most enemy forces they encountered on equal terms and outmaneuver most of those who outnumbered them.

  Thunder rumbled to the southwest — the sound of heavy shelling muffled by distance and by the trees. Lauer brushed his radio headphones back for a moment to listen and then nodded grimly. The Poles holding the highway bridge were catching hell from at least twelve artillery batteries. He didn’t envy them the experience.

  He slipped his headphones back on. The battle for the bridge wasn’t his concern. Not directly anyway. The 19th Panzergrenadier would deal with the enemy troops there. His battalion had its own mission. They were supposed to seize and hold the road junction at Jaglowice, six kilometers further down the highway.

  From there, Lauer’s tanks and infantry could block or delay any reaction force speeding toward the battle. They would also tighten the noose around any Polish units that survived the attack at Olszyna and tried to flee east down the road.

  HEADQUARTERS, POLISH 411TH MECHANIZED BATTALION, OLSZYNA

  Major Marek Malanowski was knocked off his feet as another near miss rocked his command bunker. Dust and smoke from the explosion boiled in through observation and firing slits beneath the bunker’s timber and sandbag roof. One of his sergeants helped him up.

  The major bent down and scooped his helmet off the earth floor. Then he clapped it back on over his close-cropped black hair. “I don’t think they like us very much, Jan.”

  The sergeant grinned, a quick flash of tobacco-stained teeth across a dirt-smeared face. “No, sir.”

  Malanowski took another look outside. It was like staring into a whirling, roaring maelstrom — only one made up of smoke and fire instead of water and foam. More shells churned the riverbank and nearby woods. Airbursts shredded treetops, sending wood and steel splinters whining earthward. Shock waves from the explosions tore the leaves from those trees left standing and sent them swirling wildly through the air. Plumes of oily black smoke curled into the air from several vehicles smashed and set on fire by direct hits.

  Nevertheless, despite the pounding they were taking, his defenses appeared mostly intact. If their nerves held out under the constant, shattering noise, troops in well-prepared positions could usually ride out even the worst artillery bombardment. So far, at least, the men of the 411th Me
chanized Battalion were standing firm. If they could just hold on a little longer, he was confident that they would tear to shreds any EurCon attempt to cross the river.

  Malanowski’s battalion was organized along American lines, but it was still using Soviet-style equipment. He had three companies of BMP-1s dug into the woods along the riverbanks, sited to cover the bridge and other potential crossing points with their 73mm smoothbore cannon and wire-guided antitank missiles. Their infantry squads were all dismounted and in firing positions with overhead cover to protect them from shell fragments. He even had a T-72 tank company in support.

  With that much firepower on tap, any first German tanks that tried storming across the highway bridge wouldn’t get more than a hundred meters. And if they tried sending infantry across in rubber rafts or assault boats? The Polish major shrugged. Mortars and machine guns should deal pretty handily with those poor bastards. Even a smoke screen couldn’t stop converging automatic weapons fire. Put enough bullets into an area fast enough and you were bound to hit someone.

  Of course, it would have been a lot easier if they could have just blown the bridge and been done with it. But rigging enough demolitions to bring down a major structure took time. It was also obvious. Even with a strike and counterstrike air war in progress, Warsaw hadn’t wanted to give EurCon any more excuses to escalate the conflict.

  He turned to the lieutenant manning the command bunker’s communications gear. “Any word from the Zasieki OP yet?” He had to shout to be heard over the constant, deafening barrage.

  “No, sir.”

  “What about Lieutenant Lesniak?”

  “Nothing, Major.”