THE TEN THOUSAND

by Harold Coyle

  In the distance, a series of low rumbles broke the silence. The firing of American artillery announced the beginning of the attack. Never having been the target of an artillery barrage, Seydlitz didn't quite know what to expect. In training, he had seen and even directed artillery fire at old vehicle hulks and piles of scrap metal. That, however, had been under totally controlled conditions in which every effort had been made to ensure that no mistakes would be made and that no one would be hurt. This, Seydlitz realized as he dropped to the turret floor, pulling his hatch cover over his head, was different. He, and not some pile of scrap metal, was their intended target.

  Any further thoughts were cut short as the first rounds of American artillery broke apart on their downward arc, disgorging baseball-sized anti-tank submunitions over most of the woods where Seydlitz's company was deployed. With his hatch closed and locked, there was nothing more for him to do but wait for the final impact and pray. The armor plate of his tank, while it served to insulate them from much of the noise, reducing the sound of the submunitions detonating to the point where they sounded more like firecrackers than lethal tank killers, could do nothing to diminish the fear and apprehension that Seydlitz felt as they waited.

  Seydlitz looked around the turret at his crew. Across the turret, slouched down in his seat, was the loader, watching Seydlitz. As he tried to force a smile, Seydlitz noticed that he was sweating despite the fact that just moments before he had been freezing. Though the heat generated by the tank's heater made his overcoat unnecessary, most of the sweat running down his body felt cold and clammy. He was not suffering from overheating, just overexcitement and fear.

  From his position, Seydlitz's gunner called out, "Smoke. They are laying down smoke to our front, Herr Captain."

  Turning away from his loader, whose deadpan stare stayed fixed on him, Seydlitz glanced out of the clear vision blocks that surrounded his position. To his front he could see clouds of smoke that appeared to come billowing out of the ground. Artillery-fired smoke rounds no doubt were the cause. Putting his head up to his sight extension, Seydlitz saw that his gunner had already switched the view of the tank's primary sight from clear daylight to thermal. Even this did little to clear his view of the battlefield. Without moving his eye or directing his gunner, who was slowly scanning the area to their front by traversing the turret, Seydlitz mumbled, "Plastic white phosphorus." Then added, "I can't see a damned thing."

  The gunner, keeping his eye to his sight while continuing to slowly traverse the turret, grunted. "Neither can I. Not a damned thing."

  Unlike conventional smoke, plastic white phosphorus rounds contained a mix of white phosphorus and butyl rubber. On impact, the projectile ruptured, exposing the white phosphorus to air, which caused it to burn. The butyl rubber, mixed with the phosphorus, began to burn and flake off. Floating up and away from the ruptured projectile, these flakes of burning rubber created a curtain of heat that could defeat thermal sights. Seydlitz was still watching the clouds of heated smoke drift about in the opening between his position and where the Americans had been last seen when a new series of firecracker-like pops outside reminded him that they were under attack and that he needed to report his observations and status to his commander.

  Without thinking, Seydlitz keyed the radio and called his battalion command post in preparation for reporting. He paused when he realized that he wasn't sure what to report. Not having received any reports from his platoon leaders since the artillery attack had commenced, Seydlitz naturally assumed that they had nothing to report. But that was just an assumption. If he was going to make a report to his battalion commander that his commander was going to use to make decisions, Seydlitz had to base that report on facts, not assumptions. Ignoring the calls by the battalion operations officer, Seydlitz switched his radio to his company net and contacted in turn each of his platoon leaders. Their situation, he found to his great relief, was very similar to his own. Artillery was impacting somewhere to their rear and smoke was obscuring their ability to see more than a hundred meters to the front. Warning them to stay alert and ready to move on a moment's notice, Seydlitz prepared to switch back to the battalion radio net to complete his aborted report.

  He was, however, unable to do so, for as soon as Seydlitz flipped the battalion radio frequency on, the earphones of his headset came to life with reports streaming in from the tank company to the right of Seydlitz's and with orders from the battalion commander. Quickly it dawned upon Seydlitz that the brunt of the American attack had fallen on that company and not his. Surprisingly, the first thought that came to Seydlitz's mind was one of relief, relief that it was not his company that would bear the full fury of the enemy attack and in turn not his company that would determine, at least in the beginning, whether the battalion succeeded or failed. Though such a feeling was selfish and unprofessional, it was an honest reflection of Seydlitz's state of mind and priorities.

  Seydlitz's salvation, however, was purchased at the expense of one of his fellow company commanders. From the radio traffic and reports, it was obvious that the American attack had come right under the cover of the artillery and smoke, catching the defending company momentarily off guard. Quick reactions and well-sited positions, however, cost the attacker dearly. In a matter of minutes, the lead echelon of the American assault force, consisting of M-1A1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, was shredded and scattered.

  When the two forces came together, it came down to a simple question of who saw who first. Though the artillery barrage managed to degrade the ability of the German company under attack to observe its sector of responsibility and caused them to button up, the artillery had little permanent effect on the Germans. And the artillery-delivered smoke, while covering the first three hundred meters of their advance, did nothing for the attackers during the last few critical meters. It in fact served to disrupt the attack in a few instances and separated the assaulting elements from those that had remained behind to cover the assault by fire.

  Emerging from their own smokescreen, the Americans were greeted with a volley of fire from those Leopard tanks that were undamaged and waiting. There were only a few instances where an attacking American tank managed to fire first. Even here, however, that success was fleeting as German tanks that were not under attack or had dealt with the threat immediately to their front repositioned themselves to cover gaps created by the loss of a Leopard tank to their immediate left or right. Thus, before the German battalion commander was able to issue Seydlitz his first clear order, the critical point had been reached and the crisis was over. All that remained was the elimination of a handful of American vehicles that had made it into the German-held woodlot and the restoration of the defensive perimeter.

  From his position on the periphery of this fight, Seydlitz waited impatiently for orders. While still relieved that he and his company were not involved in the fight, his ability to influence a battle that, if lost, could result in his own company being attacked from the flank and rear made him nervous and apprehensive. As he listened to the reports from the commanding officers in contact, Seydlitz followed the action on his map. As he did so, he began to notice that, while few American tanks and Bradleys were reported to have made it across the opening, those that had were beginning to work their way around the flank of the company next to Seydlitz's. If unchecked, they could find their way into his sector or, even worse, into the battalion's rear. Like many armor officers, raised to believe in the superiority of aggressive, offensive operations and trained to seek, strike, and destroy, the idea of simply sitting there while his peers were fighting for their collective lives just a few hundred meters away was becoming too much for him.

  Opening his hatch slightly and popping his head up, Seydlitz noticed that the artillery barrage on his position had lifted. Satisfied that it was clear, he threw the hatch into the full open position, popped up, and looked about. The first thing that struck Seydlitz was that there were so few signs of the artillery barrage that his unit had just b
een subjected to. Since most of his images of war were based on films and photos of the devastation created by the massive and prolonged barrages of the two world wars, this should not have surprised him, but it did. Seydlitz looked in the direction from which the noise of battle drifted through the thick pines. He should, he knew, hold his position and await orders. There was still the possibility that the fight could spill over into his sector of responsibility or, having failed to achieve success in one part of the field, the Americans could expand their attack and hit his unit. On the other hand, the old military dictum that no commander could do wrong by marching to the sound of the guns kept buzzing through Seydlitz's mind.

  He was in the process of weighing the pros and cons of moving parts of his company to the right into the fight when the sound of an M-113 armored personnel carrier coming up behind him caught his attention. Leaning over and looking to his rear, he noticed that it was the battalion's operations officer. With the same casual disregard for speed that most Germans display when driving their personal cars on the autobahns, the driver of the personnel carrier pulled around the rear of Seydlitz's tank without slowing down. When the battalion operations officer riding in the open commander's hatch of the personnel carrier was even with Seydlitz, the driver of the personnel carrier brought his vehicle to a sudden stop. The operations officer, used to the driver's habits, hung on to the machine gun at his position with one hand and the rim of the hatch with the other as he absorbed the recoil of the sudden stop by merely swaying back and forth like a jack-in-the-box that had just been sprung.

  Like many officers in the panzer corps, the operations officer freely demonstrated his individuality and devil-may-care attitude by wearing his cloth garrison cap instead of a steel helmet. Pulling the radio earphone from one of his ears, the operations officer yelled to Seydlitz as soon as he stopped swaying. "Seydlitz, your company will remain here and assume responsibility for the entire battalion's battle position. The rest of the battalion will move, as soon as the last of the enemy vehicles are found and destroyed, to an attack position south of here in preparation for a new effort to break through to the west. You will report directly to the 1st Panzer Brigade and remain in place until ordered to join us either tomorrow or the next day. Is that clear?"

  Not sure that he had heard everything over the noise of his tank's engine and that of the personnel carrier, not to mention the ongoing fight somewhere off to their right, Seydlitz restated his orders as he understood them. "So, I'm attached to brigade with the mission of holding fast here until ordered to join you sometime tomorrow west of here."

  The operations officer nodded. "That's right." Replacing the earphone over his ear, the operations officer yelled into the intercom for his driver to move out. With a jerk, the driver slammed down the personnel carrier's accelerator and went charging off back toward the sound of the battle. The operations officer, without so much as a look back, swayed this way and that, ducking low-hanging branches with a well-measured casualness as his driver picked up speed and disappeared in the direction from which they had come.

  Though he was happy to have received definite orders and therefore relieved of the need to exercise his own initiative, Seydlitz didn't like the idea of being left behind. Success in holding empty woodlots in central Germany against attacks wasn't going to end this fight. Seydlitz knew this, as he was sure that his superiors did. Only by attacking would they be able to bring the renegade Americans under control and demonstrate for anyone who needed the lesson that Germany was a sovereign and independent nation. That he wouldn't be part of that effort suddenly overcame Seydlitz's common sense that should have told him that attacks in this terrain, just like the one that his battalion was still in the process of beating down, were costly and often led to failure. He was, however, a Panzertruppen, a tank soldier with a proud family heritage and the member of a branch of service that had once been the scourge of all of Europe. If he was to serve, he wanted to be in the forefront like his ancestors.

  But Seydlitz was a soldier, a German soldier. And like all good soldiers who had orders that were clear and concise, he knew he had to obey them. Though his personal preference would have been to leave the defense to someone else, it was his duty to follow his orders regardless of how unpleasant they were.

  With a sigh, Seydlitz noticed a slackening of noise. The fight to his right was ending. Settling down into his hatch, he reached for his map and began to study it as he considered how best to deploy his company once the rest of the battalion pulled out.

  Just south of Autobahn E40 in what used to be East Germany, Company C, 3rd of the 3rd Infantry, lead element of Scott Dixon's brigade, ran into the flank guard of the 2nd Panzer Division. It was, like most of the engagements that Dixon's brigade was stumbling into on the 20th, a chance encounter. But the fact that these meetings between the 2nd Panzer Division's 2nd Brigade and Dixon's brigade were accidents didn't make them any less deadly. Racing north along a muddy, deeply rutted road that cut through the forest south of the autobahn, Captain Nancy Kozak kept checking her map while watching for the vehicles of 2nd Platoon. Behind her the tanks of Ellerbee's platoon followed.

  For the third time in less than twenty-four hours, Kozak found herself rushing into the middle of a crisis at full speed with little or no information. In Dermbach the night before Ellerbee and his platoon had charged into the middle of a street fight with anti-tank guided-missile carriers before she could get there. That morning her 1st Platoon leader, Second Lieutenant Sly Ahern, had made a wrong turn just after dawn and run head-on into a German artillery column that was in the process of setting up. And now her 2nd Platoon, which was acting as the battalion's advance guard, was in the middle of a hasty attack against an enemy force of unknown size. As she ducked to avoid low-hanging branches, the only thought that kept coming to mind, despite the desperateness of the situation and the mental exhaustion that was beginning to wear on her, was which would kill her first: enemy action or the antics of her platoon leaders.

  Though Ellerbee's tanks were technically faster, the 63-ton M-1A1 tanks of Ellerbee's platoon with their wider chassis and oversized main gun protruding well to the front could not keep up with Kozak's Bradley C60 as it ran through the narrow, twisting forest trail that none of their maps showed. Through the use of such trails, the bulk of Dixon's brigade had been able to avoid hasty roadblocks and defensive positions set up to cover the obvious routes of advance that the Germans had thrown up between Dixon and Autobahn E40. With the goal of cutting across the rear of the 2nd Panzer Division and raising hell with its rear area supply and service units, Dixon had ordered his battalion commanders to keep their own supply vehicles tucked up close, ignore their flanks and rear, and run hell-bent for leather north until they hit the autobahn, destroying anything that belonged to the German Army along the way. The battalion commanders in making their plans had included Dixon's instructions word for word in their own orders. Company commanders, well drilled in Dixon's style of leadership and tactics, passed their commander's intent on to their platoon leaders and saw to it that those orders were carried out with a vengeance. It should have come as no surprise then that Gross had simply seized the initiative and gone right into the attack.

  He was, after all, following his brigade commander's intent to the letter.

  That, however, did not excuse him in Kozak's mind from reporting to her what he was facing and what he was doing. As C60 bucked and swerved along the rutted trail, Kozak hoped that her young and energetic platoon leader hadn't bitten off more than he could deal with. Well aware of the pitfalls that most second lieutenants of infantry allow themselves to fall into, since she herself had been one, Kozak was hurrying forward with all the firepower she could muster as fast as she could. Though Ellerbee was still far from her favorite platoon leader, the performance of his platoon in Dermbach had shown that he was capable of reacting under fire and getting the job done. Of course, neither Dixon nor Kozak knew that Ellerbee's clever maneuver around the German an
ti-tank unit had actually been a mistake. The results had been good, and therefore the maneuver that had led to that success was termed brilliant.

  In an effort to show that the infantry could be just as resourceful, and in response to Dixon's stated intent, Second Lieutenant Marc Gross had led his infantry platoon in what he considered to be a classic mechanized infantry action as they fell on two German Marders as they sat in a clearing refueling. The fight that developed turned out to be rather one-sided and over before it could even degenerate into a proper fight. In retrospect, Gross had made the right choice and Kozak's concerns were unfounded. But there were a few moments, after he had begun to maneuver his platoon and before they actually attacked, when Gross himself doubted that.

  Coming up to a clearing that didn't show on his map, Gross stopped just inside of the wood line and dismounted to check out the area before sticking his nose out in the open. As he moved along the trail and left the noise of his own Bradley behind, he heard the noise of several diesel engines idling in the distance. Stopping, Gross used hand and arm signals back to his gunner, who was covering him from the Bradley, to have the dismounts come up and join him. When the fifteen dismounts of his platoon, stripped down for a fight, joined him, Gross deployed them in a line on either side of the trail they had been moving down. When all was ready, Gross, in the center of the line, began to advance, followed by his men. Gross kept looking in the direction of the sounds they were tracking. The three squad leaders with their dismounts watched Gross for his signals while ensuring that their men kept the proper distance and covered their assigned sectors.