ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (48 page)

As the Czech’s closed to within 2000m the wire guided
missiles criss-crossed the intervening distance. Artillery again fell on the
NATO positions but it was light, lacking the weight of its opening barrages and
23
^rd
MRRs commander was troubled, still he was being given
evasive answers and the time had come to take his queries higher as to the
pathetic artillery and air support. He had a pair of helicopters supporting
him, a Mi-24 Hind-D and
a Mi
-28N Havoc, although being
far from unwelcome, could not carry the same ordnance load of that of a
regiment of ground attack aircraft.

“Get me division.” He ordered his radio operator.

“Do you want to speak to the operations officer again,
sir?”

“No, I want the divisional commander.” His patience
had run out.

“No one else, understand?”

The radio operator did understand and pestered his
opposite number for several minutes before handing a headset and hand-mike
across. 23
^rd
’s commander slipped the headset on and put the
microphone to his mouth, pressing the send switch and dispensing with radio
protocol and deference to rank, as he got straight to the point.

“Where’s my artillery and air support?”

From the other end of the transmission he received a
rebuke as to his lack of respect.

“Remember who it is you are talking to Colonel!”
The Romanian snapped before continuing.

“Y
ou of all
people should know how easy it is for someone of your current position to be
removed.”
As threats went it could
not have been clearer.

“If your advance becomes any slower that may quite
swiftly come to pass!”

23
rd’s regimental commander was
neither cowed nor apologetic.

“So have you checked your
own
six
o-clock position lately,
sir
?”

There was a pause before a response was forthcoming,
and he could imagine the Romanian peering anxiously back over his shoulder at
his own second in command. It almost made him smile.

“112
^th
MRR should be appearing on your
right flank at any moment now, they at least advance as armoured troops should,
with speed……….111
^th
is coming up on your left and 93
^rd
Tanks is coming up behind in support.”

There was a further short pause and then the Romanian
went on.

“They will have the same level of artillery and air
support as your men, which is little for the time being because there has been
a foul up, ammunition is not coming forwards and the gun line’s must conserve
what they have until the problem is resolved.”
 

It was a logical reason for why the fire had been so
fitful, but it hardly explained the absence of the air forces fixed wing
aircraft.

23
^rd
MRRs rotary wing assets were working together,
seeking out AAA vehicles. They had already destroyed two Royal Artillery
vehicles; Stormer AFVs carrying Starstreak launchers in place of a 30mm
Bushmaster cannon and turret. They were working a third, the smaller Havoc
popping tantalisingly in and out of cover in an attempt to draw out the British
vehicle into a position where the deadly Hind-D could engage and destroy it.
This work was dangerous and demanding but helicopter crews were veterans. The
greatest threat to their survival came from enemy fixed wing aircraft but the
on-station A-50 Mainstay was sending a data feed showing that there were none
within AMRAAM range of this portion of the battlefield at that specific time.
The quality of early warning was not what the men at the front wished for, but
losses in AWAC aircraft had made the Generals extremely cautious in risking those
assets that still remained. The A-50s were so far to the rear that there would
be less than a minutes warning of an inbound air raid, but that was sufficient
for the men in the Hind-D and Havoc who kept a weather eye on the radar display
as they hunted.

23
^rd
’s commander was still sat atop his own command
vehicle observing the battlefield and trying to extract the reason for the
conspicuous absence of the remainder of the air force, when the Mi-24 was
transformed into a rapidly expanding ball of flame and shredded pieces of
aircraft. A split second later the Havoc followed suit, the wreckage falling
onto the bank of a small stream.

The Mainstays warning came a full minute later, and
once that warning was given it shut down and dived to the east, away from the
AIM-54 Phoenix missiles that had downed the attack helicopters.

Having launched on the helicopters at 180km, three
flights of F-14D Tomcats of USS
Gerald
Ford’s
former air wing closed to 45km
before following through with AGM-88C HARMs, and finally engaging the Soviet
CAP with AIM-120 AMRAAMs.

Aboard Crystal Palace Zero Eight,
Ann-Marie watched three pairs of US Navy F/A-18s pass below the dogfights and
take out their primary target, the Romanian divisional headquarters that had
spent too much time on the air and too little on the road, thereby allowing
itself to be
DF’d
. The Tomcats HARMs had not been
able to completely suppress the Soviet AAA, of the four surviving Hornets that
went on to attack their secondary targets, the divisions gun and mortar lines,
only two would return to friendly lines.

CHAPTER 7

North of Magdeburg: Same time
.

The western bank of the river at the Soviet bridgehead
rose quite steeply for sixty feet and flattened out for two hundred metres before
rising again as a low hillside for a further two hundred. To prevent erosion
the soil had been seeded with a hardy, long rooted variety of grass and
conifers had also been planted five years before for extra binding of the
earth.

Armies tend not to be particularly eco-friendly
especially when on the move and this one had bulldozed its way up from the
river’s edge and away inland. The natural routes up the slopes to open country
had been turned into quagmires by countless tracked armoured vehicles and in
order to accommodate the wheeled logistical support transports, fresh routes
were created by the engineers using chain saws on the young trees, before
laying roadways of steel mesh matting across ground undamaged by the armour, up
to the nearest metalled road. The result was one less of managed landscape and
more of a construction site, with just the odd tree remaining here and there
amid the morass of mud and metal.

When the Rzeszów Motor Rifle Division had crossed the
Elbe it left a detachment of its engineers behind at the river, as had other
divisions, where they could continue the building of further bridges and
maintain the existing ones. Twenty-nine pontoon and ribbon bridges had been
thrown across the Elbe irregularly spaced so that some were as close as thirty
metres from their neighbour whilst others were several hundred metres apart.
Speed rather than uniformity had been the prime force driving their
construction the night before, to get men and vehicles across in sufficient
numbers to establish a secure perimeter on the far bank before NATO could
counter attack. The Soviet engineers working on the bridge furthest upstream,
the autobahn bridge, had succeeded in spanning the gaps blown in the original
roadway by British Royal Engineers, and the first tanks had crossed the bridge
by the light of the dawn. That bridge had stood for all of an hour, Turkish
F-4s had knocked down the temporary spans along with three pontoon bridges, at
terrible cost to themselves especially as all the bridges had been repaired or
replaced within two hours.

On each occasion that NATO aircraft had attacked,
several bridges had been temporarily put out of action, but the attackers
themselves had been hacked from the skies.

The company commander of 43
^rd
MRRs
engineer company
had charge of four of the
bridges, of which one was closed for repair and maintenance at any given time,
but the weight of traffic had taken its toll on all of the temporary
constructions. For twelve hours the bridges had been at maximum capacity as fifteen
divisions had crossed onto the western bank of the Elbe. Once the bulk of the
armour, headquarters echelons, and divisional logistic and combat support units
had crossed, and convoys had moved the various divisions supply dumps over to
the west of the river he had to take three of the bridges out of service for
some emergency TLC. This remaining bridge was for east to west traffic and its
approaches, as with every one of the river crossings, was marked at intervals
showing it to be either an ‘Up’ or ‘Down’ route and field police checkpoints
out of sight of the river were enforcing the correct flow of traffic.

On the eastern bank, close to the flowing waters, a
temporary heliport had taken shape. Served by the helicopter regiments ground
support vehicles it had managed a quick turnaround for aircraft requiring only
reloads and fuel, but demand had outstripped available fuel stocks so a pair of
Havocs and three Hind-Ds were on the ground there now, their engines shut down,
the metal ticking as it cooled and contracted. The crews had gathered at a
field kitchen were they sipped at scalding coffee and wolfed down hot food as
they waited.

Security on the ground for the bridgehead was a
fraction of that employed on air defence, the AAA sites were in evidence
wherever anyone cared to look but less than a battalion of infantry and two
companies of military police were forming the immediate perimeter. The land war
had moved on and this area was now secure from ground attack, that was the
official line, and no one had dared to ask why only fifteen divisions had
crossed to the west of the Elbe, no one asked the nature of the business that
was keeping three divisions tied up east of the river.

Outside of the General Staff and of course those units
engaged in trying to unseat NATO Airborne forces from positions in their rear,
it was not common knowledge that many of the most direct supply lines from the
east had been cut, in fact for those in the know to be caught talking about it
was to invite summary execution for the offence of defeatism.

There was a fairly steady flow of trucks going east to
bring up more stores and war stocks, replenishment for the divisional depots,
and ambulances were much in evidence too, but busy with a multitude of tasks
the Major of Engineers did not notice that the traffic from east to west should
have been heavier. His world was filled with the noise of metal on metal, tools
being wielded in manual labour and the sound of his men exerting themselves in
order to have the bridges fit to carry traffic once more and themselves back on
dry land, close to the trenches for when NATO fighter bombers came visiting
again.

A locking pin for one of the bridging sections had
become bent and required changing before it sheared, the major and a sapper were
employing muscle power to take the tension off the joint connecting both
sections. They were using a manual winch attached to a length of steel hawser,
anchored at one end to the other section, and it required their combined weight
to take up the slack, working as they were against the rivers pull. Two other
sappers were over the side of the bridge, suspended by safety lines over the
water as they attempted to extract a banana shaped pin from a long straight
hole. After fifteen minutes of sweat, the pounding by hammers and the grunting
of obscenities aimed at the god of inanimate objects the offending item came
free and was swiftly replaced. The major leant, panting and perspiring against
the fender of the utility vehicle which carried much of the ancillary
equipment, including the winch they had used. As the pin checkers pulled
themselves back onto the road bed and moved along the bridge to the next
section, he waved away an offered cigarette and looked toward the western
horizon, judging that they had less than an hour’s daylight remaining. Because
he was looking in that direction he saw the vehicles at the top of the furthest
rise, the sun was behind them and he had to use a hand to shade his eyes.

“What are those morons doing coming east on a
westbound route?” He was speaking to himself but his companion stared in the
direction his company commander was looking.

“Maybe the MP’s are asleep, sir?”

Asleep or not he couldn’t allow the vehicles onto the
wrong bridge and he despatched the sapper to direct them in the right
direction. The soldier jogged along the bridge towards the western bank and the
major wiped the sweat from his eyes with a sleeve before fishing a water bottle
from a pouch on his belt. He took only enough to rinse out his mouth, gargling briefly
before spitting the fluid into the fast flowing waters of the river and
replacing the bottle securely. A line of a dozen fuel trucks escorted by
BTR-70s, was making its way slowly west across the bridge upstream of the one
on which he was stood, he studied the way the bridge sections reacted to the
load with a critical eye. It needed some serious work done on it before long or
it was going to come apart, but that was a problem to be addressed by the
Bulgarian engineers who owned it, not him.

Looking back towards the western bank he noticed that
the vehicles on the skyline had not moved down towards the river, but some of
them were moving left and right, away from the line of march so perhaps they
had managed to work it out for themselves unassisted. By shading his eyes again
he could now see that the traffic appeared to be tanks, so they had to be well
and truly lost to have arrived back at the bridgehead.

His sapper had trudged halfway up the bank but had
then stopped, turning and running back down the slope, losing his footing at
one point and was now back on the bridge, waving his arms but the major could
not hear what was being shouted. He looked back up at the crest at one of the
tanks traversing the skyline, and saw that its main gun was pointing towards
the bridge carrying the fuel convoy. Understanding came to him just before gun
smoke spouted from its muzzle.

The 120mm HESH round screamed above the line of
vehicles to strike the rearmost, the BTR at the convoy’s tail end. A second
round struck the lead vehicle, another BTR and left it burning, blocking the
way for the trucks.

The Leclerc tanks of the French 8
^th
Armoured Brigade on the high ground above the river started what would be a
steady and systematic bombardment to destroy the bridgehead.

Machine gun fire cut down the running sapper and
realising the position they were now in the major ran to the downstream side of
the bridge, tearing off his belted equipment and steel helmet as he shouted a
warning to his men. The unseen machine gunner switched fire to the running
officer and the cracking sound of high velocity rounds passing close by spurred
on the major who dived headlong into the frigid water. A tank round exploded
the fuel truck at the head of the line now trapped by the wrecked and burning
BTRs that had been the escort. Needing no further encouragement the sappers of
the 43
^rd
’s engineer company followed their commanders lead,
leaping off whichever bridge they happened to be on and swimming for it.

A short, vicious battle took place between the French
and Soviet infantry backed up by the barrelled AAA sites the dug in Soviet’s
would have the advantage if they had time to recover from the surprise.
ZSU-23-4 self-propelled AAA vehicles turned their quadruple cannon on the
French and where they had no effect upon the main battle tanks, they were
devastating against the lightly armoured French AMX-10P Infantry Fighting
Vehicles and the infantry debussing from them. The French infantrymen used
Milan, grenades, their vehicles 21mm cannon, and sheer guts to silence the ZSUs
before fixing bayonets and beginning the business of trench clearing. Meanwhile
on the far bank the crews of the attack helicopters had run to their machines
once it was clear the bridgehead was under ground assault. Fingers flew over
switches and the machines began to hum as batteries fed current to starter
motors, the humming changed to a heightening whine that preceded the sight of
rotor blades beginning to turn, but oh so slowly. The Hind-D nearest the field
kitchen was not surprisingly the one most likely to take to the air first. The
helicopters rotor blades had just begun to move with a blur when the French
finally noticed them, and turrets began to swivel in the direction of the sound
of the turbines.

A tank round exploded on the landing field and the
first helicopter took to the air as if startled into flight by the detonation
of high explosive. It’s was the speedier of the trio of Hind’s and it rose to
ten feet, pivoted in the air to line up on a gap between two clumps of trees at
the edge of the landing field and adopted a nose down attitude in order to gain
airspeed more quickly. It was struck by a chance shell, the 120mm HESH round
severed the tail and sent the aircraft cartwheeling into the ground where it
caught fire. The French armour got the range of the machines still spooling up,
wrecking them before they could get off the ground.

Satisfied that all the attack helicopters were taken
care of the tanks moved on, seeking fresh targets and leaving a scene where
black smoke boiled up from a field occupied by twisted and ruined airframes,
exploding ammunition and burning fuel.

The major of engineers didn’t fight the current; he
allowed it to carry him along and struck out at an angle to the flow in a
manner that would take him to the eastern shore but without draining all his
limited strength. Tank rounds exploded on the sections of floating roadway
where they connected to one another, or smashed into the pontoons that bore
them. Any vehicles were engaged and able-bodied soldiers on the banks or upon
the bridges were cut down without warning, but the only rounds landing near the
men in the water were ricochet’s or just poorly aimed.

The flow took him under several bridges which bore vehicles,
their movement stalled by events and the reaction of the drivers and crews were
mixed. Some officers were trying to get their packets of vehicles backed up, in
the hope of regaining the eastern bank and saving the vehicles and the precious
stores they carried, whilst in other places the BTR, BMP and BDRMs that had
been the escorts were trying to make a fight of it. As more and more enemy
armour began to appear, spreading out along the western bank, an air of panic
began to settle on the bridgehead. Men were ignoring their officers and
abandoning the vehicles, seeking the safety of the east bank. Willingly or
unwillingly more men were finding themselves in the water, as a last resort in
the quest for safety or as a matter of necessity, their retreat along the
bridges being cut off by enemy fire. Many disappeared below the surface never
to reappear; only the steadier men and the stronger swimmers prevailed where
they had still been wearing all their equipment on entering the river. Those
men were able to keep their heads as the weight of ironmongery dragged them
below the surface, preventing panic turning fingers into uncoordinated rubber
digits as they undid buckles and freed themselves from the ballast.