by Andy Farman
It could not have been more than a few minutes later that he awoke suddenly, his heart pounding in the guilty realisation that he had fallen asleep, and then he noticed his gunner was snoring. His small command had fallen asleep at the switch and he reached across to angrily shake them to wakefulness.
The flash of lightning startled him, but not as much as the impression he had out of the corner of his eye of a figure stood beside a tree just a dozen paces away from their position. Snatching up his rifle he brought it up to his shoulder, cursing the light that had robbed him of his night vision but the next bolt of lightning, following quickly after the first revealed only an empty landscape of trees and churned, water logged forest floor.
Bethers released the breath he had been holding before rudely awakening the gunner and his number two. Thunder boomed in the distance and all of them now lay with one eye closed to preserve night vision against the sudden flashes that preceded them.
Colin crawled around the perimeter checking the men and whispering words of encouragement. He too had found himself falling into a doze and recognising it for what it was he went off to do the rounds. Of his remaining twenty three men still able to fight he caught seven of them sleeping, and awoke each one by cradling an earlobe of the offender with an index finger, and then digging a thumbnail into the soft flesh. It brought instant awareness to the individual without causing them to call out in pain or alarm. Once back in the land of the living he whispered to each of these the same verdict on their lack of self-discipline.
“You just lost yer shaggin name, bonnie lad.” Then he moved onto the nearest NCO or senior Guardsmen to inform them of something quite similar, and ensure that they did their job in future.
Jim Popham found 1 Platoons Warriors in a long line behind varying depths of cover, where they could assist the Highlanders with their 30mm Rarden cannons if called upon. The 82nd Warriors moved into laager a tactical bound behind them and their turrets swung outwards to cover interlocking arcs of fire. Jim left the APC, or ‘Track’ in Americanese, to pass the word. Stay close to the vehicles; don’t go visiting the neighbours who talk even weirder than the Coldstreamer’s. Maintain radio silence, only smoke inside the vehicles, and don’t goof off. As soon as it was light enough they would be moving out to link up with 1 Platoon, so their time would be best employed by preparing their weapons.
The younger and more inexperienced wanted to know why they weren’t already moving out, and he took the time to explain the frightmare, which that course of action would quickly become. In a night action in a forest against a superior force of infantry, Command and Control would go out the window as men became disorientated and got separated, fire fights between friendly troops would be a certainty, and no amount of available artillery support could prevent them from getting bogged down and surrounded in those circumstances, needing they themselves to be extracted.
He was approaching the sixth vehicle with his orders when a figure left the huddle of paratroopers stretching their legs and gassing in whispers beside it, shoulders hunched against the rain. The figure ducked out of view back into the fighting vehicle and after giving the men his instructions he went to investigate.
Three men sat in the darkness inside and by the shielded light of his minimag Jim recognised each of the paratroopers, but the boots and camouflage trousers protruding from the gunners seat in the turret were of British pattern rather than US Army.
Addressing the nearest trooper he asked the question. “Who’s that?”
“Koplenski sir, new guy.”
“Brandt, you are a heartbeat away from becoming a permanent resident on my shit list.”
Brandt gave a resigned shrug.
“It’s Company Sergeant Major Tessler, sir.”
Jim raised his voice slightly. “CSM, be so good as to be waiting beside my track when I return from rounds………don’t make me hunt you down and shoot you like a dog, ok?”
“Sir!” a disembodied voice replied.
Serge and Mikhail were lying two hundred yards from the Guards perimeter when they were joined by a soldier who knelt beside them to pull back on his equipment from where it had lain.
“Zdarovy?”
The soldier lay prone beside Serge before reporting.
“They are where they were reported to be by the survivors of the company they broke, Colonel General. The perimeter is about twenty metres inside their block of trees.” He described in detail the locations of the shell scrapes and each gun position.
“Strength?”
“Maybe an under strength platoon, sir. They will not be a problem for us.”
Serge was not quite as optimistic, whoever these enemy troops were they had already defeated three times their own numbers, the amount generally recognised for the successful over-running of a defended position. It was clear that only a planned assault would succeed where the previous hasty attacks had failed, hence the reconnaissance by his most experienced scout.
He squinted as lightning painted the forest momentarily white, robbing it of all colour, and then he had to blink frantically before continuing.
“Those damned mines of theirs are a problem, did you locate any or have they expended them all?" The soldiers answer was lost amid the sound of thunder and he paused before repeating himself
“Sir, I found none along either their left or right flanks, I believe they have used them all there. Three remain covering the track and at the rear they still have two, however neither of those will now function as desired when they need them.”
Nodding in satisfaction Serge dismissed the man back to his section with a word of praise, before sending a runner back to the first of the new mortar lines. The orders he gave his Spetznaz commanders sent Mikhail and his men to the left flank of the enemy position, to incorporate the remnants of the paratroopers company and set up a point of fire. Serge would take the other company to the rear where he would lead the assault. Neither company commander was happy with that item but Serge would not be swayed. Should the attack fail then they would reform and provide covering fire for Mikhail’s company to attack from the left.
Had they not expended all their RPGs in the house-to-house fighting in Braunschweig they would have employed them with telling effect here, but there was no point in wishing for what no longer remained.
Whoever succeeded would fight through the NATO position and reorganise amongst the gorse beyond the logging track, where the remainder would join them before moving off to attack the reported field workshops the recce patrol had seen.
“What arrangements for the wounded sir?”
“If they can move unassisted and still fight, then they come with us…otherwise they will have to be left behind. No dawdling on the NATO position my friends, once they go off the air their artillery may give it serious attention.” Serge knew the dawn was approaching and with it NATO air and ground units. They were running out of time and he wanted to finish things here and get clear of this forest to where they could create as much havoc amongst the enemy as he could.
Each of his men had been carrying a mortar round in their packs since they had evacuated Braunschweig, and with relief they had filed past a series of mortarmen on tracks, firebreaks and in clearings on the way to the start line, handing the munitions over where they were stacked up by type, high explosive and smoke. Some of the rounds were captured NATO munitions; the 81mm rounds performed perfectly well out of the Russian 82mm tubes. It went without saying that NATO could not utilise captured Red Army munitions in the same way and this went for all calibres of weapon. For decades, since the raising of the Iron Curtain they had planned on being able to make use of their potential opponents stores whilst denying those same forces the use of their own, and all by the simple act of producing gun barrels just a smidge wider than their enemies.
With five alternate sites roughly 300m apart, beside their current one, they could hopefully stay ahead of the NATO artillery, but they would not have the luxury of bedding in the base plates
by firing rounds, and therefore accuracy would suffer. With the counter battery threat there could be no adjusting fire, they would send over a single belt of rounds and then relocate at the run, carrying the barrels, bipods, base plates, aiming posts and sights. The on-site stock of rounds at each mortar line would be abandoned once they displaced, but if NATO artillery did not respond then that position, and those rounds, could be utilised again.
The runner who arrived at the mortars had paced out the distance from the start line on his way, and fractional adjustments to the elevation of the barrels were made accordingly. Now that all was set the lieutenant commanding the section watched the luminous minute hand of his timepiece creep around its face.
Jim Popham was on his way back to his own Warrior when a rumbling started from the north. He thought it was still thunder at first but the sound continued on unabated, and he paused to listen for a moment to what would become known as the largest artillery bombardment in Europe since the Second World War, as the Red Army made a final effort to break the NATO line.
The sound was eclipsed by the detonations much closer to home of several thousand bomblets arriving on the largest concentrations of soviet airborne troops, and Jim flinched, putting his hands to his ears to drown out the cacophony of sound.
Ray Tessler was trying not to feel like a schoolboy sent to wait outside the headmaster’s office when Major Popham returned, however the American merely informed him he would command one of the 1 Platoon vehicles, as would Oz and Arnie.
On the soviet mortar line the soldiers glanced apprehensively up at the skies, wondering if an MLRS had targeted the real estate they were currently occupying. The forest still reverberated with the echoes of the bomblets that had just annihilated about two thirds of each battalion’s strength and the officer had to snap at them to return their attention to the business at hand.
The lieutenant raised his arm, in his uplifted hand the white pages of an open notebook stood out clearly in the dark and the number two men on each mortar inserted the finned base of a round into the muzzles and paused, retaining their grip on the round as they watched for the arm to fall. As the second hand completed the minute his arm swept downwards and the rounds were released.
The recoil sank the base plates an inch into the earth, and then the bipods retaining collars were unclipped, the barrels were unseated from those same base plates which were then hauled from the sucking mud by anxious hands.
‘Arthur’ was still scanning the forest and had computed the mortar lines location even as the first mortar barrel was being slung onto a shoulder by a soldier already running toward the next position, as fast as his burden would allow him.
The 155mm rounds landed slightly ‘over’, but still close enough to have killed anyone remaining. As it was the concussions bowled over the last of the retreating men despite the two hundred metres worth of trees between himself and the point of impact.
Coming so soon after the employment of the MLRS, Colin’s first reaction to the belt of mortar rounds straddling the logging track was that they were about to become blue on blue casualties, those targeted by accident by friendly forces. One Nine, the company commander, assured him otherwise and it was several minutes before this was repeated, the rounds landing alongside the firebreak to their left and bringing a tree crashing down.
Counter battery fire moaned mournfully overhead and with a large degree of satisfaction several Guardsmen cheered on hearing secondary explosions, but the men were not cheering five minutes later when the next belt arrived, landing square on to their position with one of the rounds exploding amongst the collection of wounded.
L/Cpl Bethers ignored the screams and switched on his nightscope. According to his watch the dawn should soon be breaking but for now it was as dark as pitch. The low pitched hum the device emitted cut out without warning, its batteries exhausted and Bethers placed it to one side and gripped the trip fares communications cord, carefully pulling it taut in readiness for use.
The next fall of mortar rounds was again by the logging track, but this time they were smoke rounds rather than HE and the defenders on that side listened hard for an attack to emerge from that direction.
B Battery received the fire mission but received a ‘stop’ order from the brigade artillery rep. On receiving the gun lines acknowledgement brigade sent the Apache back into the area for a damage assessment of the MLRS strikes. The Apache had monitored the cat and mouse game between the enemy mortars and their own artillery, and on their own initiative made a beeline for that area of forest. It wasn’t the mission they had been given, but that could wait a little longer.
Thoroughly winded by their exertions the mortar crews reached their next base plate position and flopped down in the mud, too spent to continue until they had at least regained their breath.
The sound of the helicopters beating blades came upon them quickly, but the trees masked the direction the low flying aircraft was approaching from until it cleared the pines at the northern end of the clearing.
Flaring to a halt barely six feet above the treetops its downwash whipped the branches of the conifers to frenzy, and the belly mounted chain gun pivoted downwards, questing the heat sources below. 30mm cannon shells marched across the clearing sending up geysers of mud in a line until it reached the weary mortar crews who were only just starting to react. Too late, much too late for all but three who managed to reach the trees, then finally the helicopter banked away to disappear into the rain swept pre-dawn.
Bethers hissed at his gunner to stop gawping over his shoulder and look to his front. “I can’t see shag all corpor…” The unmistakeable sound of someone stumbling in the dark interrupted him and Bethers tugged hard on the communications cord, which set off the flare pot to reveal the approaching first line of soviet troops.
Taking up his clicker Bethers squeezed not once but twice, because the Claymore failed to detonate on the first and subsequent attempts. His gunner on seeing the difficulty immediately opened fire along with his number two, aiming short bursts at individuals amongst the trees. Bethers unplugged the firing cable from the clicker and hurriedly inserted into it the cable for his last mine, and with a final look to ensure the enemy were in range of where the mine should be he depressed the clicker’s generator arm.
The firing of the flare pot had got Colin’s attention but Bethers did not answer his radio. He was already crawling towards the rearmost position as the gimpy and riflemen to either side of the gun group engaged targets he himself could not yet see due to the severed boughs and splintered sections of tree trunks that had steadily accumulated on the forest floor since the ambush.
To add to their woes they were now being taken under fire from the left by crew served automatic weapons, firing on sustained fire rates.
He paused long enough to call in a fire mission to suppress the fire from the left before peering around the bole of a tree.
He could see the soviet troops skirmishing toward them through the trees and then his eyes fell on something closer to, in a tree a few paces from Bethers and his gun group. He recognised the firing cable wrapped around the object, strapping it to a tree trunk where it had been repositioned and faced down at an angle at the defenders.
Bethers finally connected the end of the cable into a clicker and Colin saw him glance toward the soviet troops, judging the moment to fire.
“NO BETHERS!”
The gun group and riflemen in the nearest shell scrapes disappeared amid black smoke, the welter of flying wood splinters, blood, bone and mud blown skywards by the impacting shrapnel from the Claymore. A white phosphorus grenade exploded, set off in the pouch of one of the gun group by the impact of a ball bearing passing through the pouch. The rounds in magazines next to the grenade began cooking off in the intense heat it produced.
Colin removed a grenade from a pouch and called up the remaining groups on his PRC 349, ordering them to send every other man to form a new line level with his shell scrape, and then knelt up to thr
ow the grenade beyond the lingering smoke.
As he threw, the first figure emerged out of the smoke, silhouetted against flare pots glow and Colin snatched up his SLR, bringing it up into the aim and shot him through the chest. The grenade went off out of sight, and he heard screams from at least one injured man before hurriedly crawling backwards.
Coming through the trees with the second line of troops, Serge saw the first wave disappearing into the white smoke seventy metres ahead, and the firing from the flank paused while the gunners shifted aim, keeping the fire ahead of their own troops.
The first band of light appeared on the eastern horizon but down in the trees this was hardly noticeable. The rain was still falling from above as Serge urged his line forward and shouted at the third line to also speed up when firing from the contested position rose in ferocity. Splashing through puddles they were moving forwards at a jog to close on the position when cannon shells began exploding amongst the third line of the company. The man beside him hesitated, looking fearfully up towards the sound of the beating blades and Serge grabbed an arm, dragging him on to where the Apache would not be able to attack for fear of hitting friendly troops.
Mortar rounds, definitely unfriendly ones, landed in the vicinity of the second company, and the fire support from there faltered.
Serge ran across the firebreak and into the block NATO occupied, where he slowed to a walk, crouching over to present a smaller target and keeping tree trunks between himself and the sound of firing.
As he drew closer he saw the attack was stalled, so he took the next four men into the block to within grenade range. The flare pot had burnt itself out and Serge waited for more light, the risks of a grenade hitting a tree and bouncing back amongst friendly troops was too great.
A shermouli rose from the far end of the block to provide light for the defenders, and on a command from Serge they all threw together.
