ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (26 page)

Leaving 4 Company they came through a jumble of
boulders to 1 Company’s left hand platoon, and these trenches had been dug by
CSM Probert’s platoon but were now occupied by a mixture of 82
^nd
men and Coldstreamers taken from the other three rifle companies. The majority
of Headquarter Company were Guardsmen, as were Support Company, he had an
additional Mortar Platoon there from the 82
^nd
, but Pat Reed only had one rifle company remaining
that was made up entirely of Guardsmen, 2 Company. The brigade commander, true
to his promise, had made enquiries as to the low numbers of replacements for
the Guards battalion under his command, and had been informed that the
regiments’ second battalion, 2CG, was being reformed and had priority call. As
to the question of the lack of recognition for 1CG’s efforts, he was informed
that the Defence Secretary herself had reviewed each of Pat Reed’s
recommendations and found they lacked sufficient merit for gallantry awards.

The Americans viewed Lt Col Reed’s recommendations in
a different light as regards their own soldiers and the previous evening he had
been pleased to announce the names of men from the 82
^nd
who were receiving medals for gallantry. He couldn’t give the same news to his
own regiments’ officers but he did announce promotions that included those on
the casualty lists. He could create NCOs from buckshee guardsmen, give existing
NCOs the next rank and make Warrant Officers out of senior NCOs, but it took
higher authority to approve and confirm the raising of men to commissioned
status, or giving an officer the next rank. However, pending confirmation by
that higher authority, Captain Sinclair received his brevet majority, young Mr
Taylor-Hall became a Lieutenant and a signal was sent to RHQ requesting that
they inform CSM Probert of his brevet promotion to 2Lt, as soon as his surgery
permitted of course.

Arriving ahead of the US 4
^th
Corps, a large amount of ammunition and stores had arrived the previous
afternoon and a newly promoted Colour Sergeant Osgood was busy with a fatigue
party distributing 1 Company’s share of it.

All about the battalion location their own defences
had been thickened up with US made bar mines and Claymores. The division had
replenished ammunition stocks and had more to spare, all they needed now was
luck.

Whilst the Iron Curtain had stood, the Red Air Force
occupied former WWII Luftwaffe bases in East Germany during its decade’s long
face off with NATO. After the reunification, the modern Luftwaffe inherited a
dozen airbases that had changed little since the 1940s and promptly closed the
majority. Cottbus, to the south east of Berlin was retained and modernised,
unfortunately the recent withdrawal from the region had been so rapid as to
make the Soviet’s a gift of a fully functional airbase with modern facilities.

The former airbases of Sperenberg, Welzow, Falkenberg,
Wittstock, Merseburg, Altenburg and Holzdorf were quickly reoccupied and the
runways patched up. It was from these airbases that the close air support
against NATO on the Elbe/Saale line had been provided, and would continue as
the Red Army began its latest drive for the Channel ports.

Cottbus airbase was of particular interest to NATO due
to its proximity to one of Europe’s main east/west trading routes and the roads
and rail lines that followed it.

At 0433hrs the bulk of the Belgian Para Commando
Brigade had landed at three drop zones around the Twelfth century town of Bad
Rouen.

Belgium’s 1
^st
and 3
^rd
Parachute Battalions in company with 3
^rd
Lanciers-Parachutists Battalion and twelve of its jeeps on pallets, landed
along with the 14
^th
Parachute Commando Engineer Company south of the
town, on either side of the river Spee. Meanwhile 2
^nd
Commando
Battalion and 35
^th
Parachute Commando Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battery
dropped on Cottbus airbase itself, five miles beyond the town’s northern
suburbs.

The fighting at the airbase was bloody, swift and
still taking place as the C-130s of the Belgian Air Force’s 15
^th
Transportation Wing landed the GIAT 105mm guns and crews of the brigade field
artillery battery.

To the south, the 1
^st
and 3
^rd
Parachute Battalions carried out a simultaneous
assault of both ends of the A15 autobahn bridge where it crossed the Spee on
the edge of the town.

Being over a hundred miles from the fighting, the
reservists protecting the bridge had mounted only a small guard whilst the
remainder slept. They were all men in their forties, recalled after twenty
years of civilian life and given the minimum of refresher training. The
Belgians took out the sentries without a sound before moving on the trenches
and fighting vehicles occupied by sleeping reservists. It
wasn’t a completely bloodless victory; apart from the
sentries, three other members of the bridge guard fell to silenced rounds or
cheese wire garrottes.

With the bridge secure the Belgian Paratroopers’ 3
^rd
Battalion, less its mortar platoon, remained on the eastern bank whilst the
engineers prepared the bridge for demolition, and the 3
^rd
Lanciers
special forces company,
1’ere
Compagnie d’Equipes Specialisee de
Reconnaissance
mounted their jeeps
and went north into the town.

Bad Roulen has two rail lines which enter it and join
at a small marshalling yard on the western side of the river. The bridges that
carry the railway lines lie at either end of the town park on the eastern bank.

The town fathers had been working hard over the past
few years to undo the damage the communists had done by industrialising the
city and ignoring environmental controls. The riverside park had been cleaned
up, landscaped and beautified, but the heavily polluted river still had a long
way to go. The park had become a tented city housing the lower ranks of the two
companies garrisoning the town, and it was the job of the jeep company to
prevent them from interfering by causing chaos and mayhem, whilst securing the
railway bridges.

By the time the jeep company reached the first rail
bridge the alarm had been raised by the airbase, not by radio but by landline
as the Belgians carried portable jamming sets that flooded their known
frequencies with silent noise, a means of cutting communications without
alerting the victims.

The commander of the jeep company watched through a
night scope as an officer emerged from a sandbagged CP and listened for the
sound of gunfire before hurriedly pulling on his fighting order as he ran to
rouse his men.

Before the running officer could reach the park a jeep
had drawn level with him and a well-aimed blow across the back of his neck with
an entrenching tool sent him tumbling. The jeeps raced for the bridge, cutting
down the sentries at the western end and driving across, the vehicles bucking
wildly on railway sleepers. The sentries on the eastern bank shared the same
fate as their mates on the opposite side, and the bridge was in Belgian hands.

A jeep and its crew equipped with 40mm Mk-19 automatic
grenade launchers were left to secure either end of the bridge, along with a Milan
equipped vehicle. Two of the company’s snipers found themselves spots where
they could best observe the tented area in the park whilst the drivers set up
GPMGs. Once he was satisfied his men were in position the Belgian company
commander established radio communications with the brigades mortar line, and
then settled down to wait for the Engineers to blown the autobahn.

Dropping the solidly built bridge into the Spee wasn’t
a particularly scientific event, but the engineers were not looking for marks for
grace and artistic interpretation. Cratering charges had been laid on the
on-ramps for good measure and when the spans were dropped the ramps were
wrecked also.

The roar of the demolition charges reverberated
upriver and on hearing it the seven remaining jeeps entered the park in column
and accelerated down the main ‘street’ of the tented area, firing into the
canvas structures as they went.

The sound of the autobahn bridge being destroyed had
brought men stumbling from the tents into the darkness. They could hear the
sound of speeding vehicles but the blackout was in force and they were unaware
that NATO troops were amongst them until the jeeps opened fire.

As the jeeps cleared the tented area the commander
called for mortar fire on the centre of the park, and the Belgian’s on the
first railway bridge opened fire. Anyone the snipers saw who appeared to be
attempting to establish command and control were singled out and despatched,
whilst the grenadiers and ‘gimpy’ gunners began expending rounds as fast as
they could fire.

Before the smoke had chance to settle the paratroops
to the south were seeding the area with booby-traps and moving north to their
next objective. It is far easier to take a bridge by assaulting both ends at
once hence the 3
^rd
Battalion remained on the eastern bank. Apart from
the two railway bridges there were four road bridges spanning the river within
the town limits, hence the 3
^rd
Battalion had remained on the eastern
bank.        

On the northern edge of the town park the jeep company
met its first real opposition. The company commander elected to take the second
railway bridge in the same
fashion as
they had taken the first; using the speed of the vehicles and the firepower
they carried to best advantage.

The previous rail bridge had been at street level with
barriers to stop traffic whenever a train was due, however the second bridge
was raised above street level, crossing 29
°
above the Spee and the streets running beside it. Access for maintenance
vehicles to the top of the steep embankment at the eastern end was via a ramp
behind a row of buildings, with a tight turn at the top before a narrow
gateway.

The jamming that had blinded the air defences to the
presence of troop carrying transports had dissipated with the departing E-2C Hawkeye
that had accompanied them. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence for NATO deep
strikes to venture out this far and the AAA detachment had learnt by experience
that trying to burn through the interference only earned you an anti-radiation
missile for your troubles. So the radars had been switched off until the crews
were certain that neither they nor the town had been the NATO aircrafts’ target.

The sounds of the autobahn being dropped and the
attack on the park alerted the detachment that a ground assault was in
progress. They attempted to broadcast an alert by radio but when this failed
the crews buttoned up their vehicles, and the ZSUs lowered their quad barrels
to the anti-infantry position.

The ZSU, or ‘Zeus’, mounted as it was on a PT-76
amphibious tank chassis was as deadly to infantry and light armour as it was to
rotary and fixed wing aircraft. Each of its four 23mm water-cooled cannons
fired mixed belts of explosive, fragmentation and armour piercing tracer rounds
at a rate of 1000 rounds a minute from a high speed, hydraulically stabilised
armoured turret, making it very accurate and very hard to kill without
anti-armour weapons.

Bad Roulen had two AAA detachments assigned to its
sector, one at the airbase and one covering the rail junction and marshalling
yards where the coverage there encompassed the autobahn bridge also. Both
detachments were standard in size and equipment, four ZSU-23-4s and four mobile
SA-9 Gaskin launchers in each to provide short and medium range cover.

As the first Belgian jeep appeared at the top of the
embankment there was one seconds worth of ear splitting cacophony as it was
engaged and reduced to jagged scrap by a ZSU that had driven out onto the
tracks at the western end of the bridge. It was guarding against just such an
eventuality using its night sight to watch for any enemy approach. The jeep had
not quite cleared the gateway so it was now blocking the way for the remainder,
and as it began to burn it illuminated the remaining jeeps which were nose to
tail on a narrow ramp with no hope of getting past.

The sentries on the bridge were not equipped with
night viewing devices and although they heard the Belgian vehicles rushing up
the ramp, they leant across the stone parapet beyond the bridge and were able
to identify them by the light from the burning jeep reflected off the buildings
backing onto the embankment. The stalled line of vehicles in flickering light,
were then taken under fire by the sentries. A second jeep was lost in the act
of reversing back down the incline when its driver was hit and lost control.
The vehicle veered off the narrow ramp and rolled down the side of the
embankment, spilling out its occupants as it went.

The Belgians carried out a hasty retreat, withdrawing
back the way they had come, and on finding cover in a side street they
dismounted and called for mortar fire support.