' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (19 page)
Authors: Andy Farman
“What’s it doing?” Staff Sergeant Vernon asked. He had gone to check on the eastern pointsman, Lance Corporal Tessa Newall.
The only sound now from the airfield was that of metal upon metal from the direction of the crippled T-90.
Staff Vernon was wedged into the gun pit of the 13 Platoon Wessex guys. Even given Tessa’s slight build it was a little snug
in there.
The gun controller was peering through the GPMG’s starlight scope sight.
“An armoured recovery vehicle turned up a while ago and stopped inside the trees. The tank crew probed for more mines, and now the wrecker has come alongside and the mechanics are hitting that thing with ever bigger hammers.”
“Can’t you stop them with this?” he tapped the cold metal of the gimpy’s top cover.
“Take a look for yourself.” The infantryman told the military policeman.
S/Sgt Vernon put his eye to the sight and quickly withdrew it. A BTS-5B tracked recovery vehicle was alongside the tank, and a juicy high value target it made, but the open maw of the T-90s muzzle stared straight back.
“Off-putting, isn’t it?” the gun controller said with a chuckle.
“They are conserving ammunition I reckon, but if we have a blat in their direction we’ll soon know about it. We need something a bit bigger and the LAW80s don’t have the legs.”
“The radios are back up and there is some Italian artillery somewhere. We could give them a go?”
“No one here knows how to call in artillery fire, do you?”
“Yes actually.” The staff sergeant replied. “I wasn’t always a Monkey.”
The map provided the Soviets grid reference and his compass the bearing from his location to the target. Unlike the remaining enemy tanks this one was not tucked in too close to safely call in fire from nine miles away, not without the risk of themselves becoming collateral damage at any rate.
The obvious problem, passing a fire control order in English to an Italian, was happily solved by the US mortar fire direction centre along at TP33 using one of its company’s cooks to translate.
“Hello Mike Three One, Address Group Tango Alpha, this is Quebec One Two Bravo, address group Victor Zulu, relay to Golf One One Delta, address group Foxtrot Yankee, fire mission over?”
“Mike Three One, relay message for Golf One One Delta, address group Foxtrot Yankee, fire mission…send over?”
“Quebec One Two Bravo, fire mission grid five eight nine, zero six seven, direction zero two nine nine, tank and recovery vehicle in the open, neutralise, over.”
“Mike Three One, fire mission grid five eight nine, zero six seven, direction zero two nine nine, tank and recovery vehicle in the open, neutralise, out.”
There followed a delay as the company cook, a chef in a Sicilian restaurant in Bouckville, Mississippi, gave the message via field telephone to a battery commander who hailed from Genoa. Accent wise it was comparable to a resident of Somerset speaking to a Scottish Highlander, but it worked.
“Mike Three One, shot, over.”
“Quebec One Two Bravo, shot, out.”
Almost a minute passed before the US FDC transmitted again.
“Splash, over.”
“Splash, out.”
The three rounds missed by a good hundred metres and there was frantic activity as the crew of the high value asset, the armoured recovery vehicle, hurried to depart.
Calmly, the RMP NCO adjusted the fires and as the recovery vehicle carefully reversed back along the cleared path through the mines it received a near miss. But so did the gun pit as it did not take an Einstein to work out where the spotter was.
“On target, fire for effect!” Vernon shouted as the ground heaved from a sabot round that had already been loaded and ready in the guns breach. It was a far quicker process to fire an existing round than carry out a full unload. The guns twenty two pre-arranged rounds in the automatic loader were not a major task to rearrange but it still meant a delay when even seconds count.
Heavy calibre machine gun and lighter 7.62 rounds tore up the ground.
The GPMG was dismounted by its gunner braving the incoming fire
to preserve it from damage, and the occupants of the gun pit huddled down to weather the storm. The next main gun round was HEF, high explosive fragmentation. Never has fifty seven seconds seemed so endless, but with the arrival of the next rounds a 155mm shell struck the engine deck and killed the crew as well as fling the turret twenty feet.
The tank was wrecked and the recovery vehicle was on its side burning.
“So you were an MFC or something, before you transferred to the RMP?” the gun controller asked, re-mounting the GPMG onto its tripod.
“No, that was the first time I ever called in a fire mission, even in practice.”
They all stared at him.
“I was a civilian projectionist, and I showed old 8mm training films to RA army cadets on Tuesday evenings.” The staff sergeant replied.
“Anyway, must be off.”
Ariete Task Force
Autobahn 2
Echo One Five, the lead Lince with Lorenzo’s tank squadron once again found the unmistakable signs of the Soviet’s passage through the forest. It cut directly across their path where the enemy had turned south.
Lorenzo had them halt as his squadron caught up, and he left his tank to speak to the recce troop’s commander at the young officer’s request.
They squatted beside the muddy and deep indentations created by tank tracks, the rain now starting to turn them into puddles. He did not know what he and the recce troop commander were supposed to gain from the experience. He was in danger of allowing his sense of the ridiculous to take over. Had the young man sampled the mud between finger and thumb before announcing sagely that
‘Long knife pale face’s steel horses pass um thataway, maybe one hour, maybe two’
he would not have been able to stave off the threatening laughter. It was not that he did not realise the seriousness of the situation, but lieutenant colonels get scared too and the human psyche will clutch at humour as a way to release the stress.
Indeed the young man had dipped a finger into the mud and held it for Lorenzo to smell. One of the vehicles was leaking fuel, but he scented petrol, not diesel. The Soviets were growing desperately sort of fuel if they were using the far more flammable petrol in at least some of their fuel tanks. Modern armoured vehicles were designed to run on diesel, although petrol, paraffin or even alcohol would keep them going if push came to shove, but at a cost. Crew and vehicle survivability was greatly reduced. Not for nothing had the petrol engined Sherman tanks of the previous war been nickname
‘Tommy Cookers’
by the German troops.
Echo One Two had its engine switched off but it coasted downhill, its driver controlling the speed with the vehicles handbrake so as not to have brake lights reveal its presence.
The Lince thermal scanners found nothing untoward between TP33 and the current position, four miles from Braunschweig airfield.
At the next truck stop, set on a slope cut into the forest, the downward incline of the autobahn ceased and the Lince engine restarted.
The absence of the enemy was perplexing. Somewhere out there was more armour of the Soviet’s 91
st
Tank Regiment, and it had apparently come from blocking positions in the Lehre valley but now had vanished. Had they given up on the idea? If so, then why had they not appeared at the next TP where autobahn 2 crossed the canal?
Set just back in the sodden treeline behind the truck stop, a ZSU-23-4 reported the Italian recce vehicles passage. Completely reliant on battery power to operate its radios and muscle power to hand-crank the turret if necessary at that
moment, the anti-aircraft artillery vehicle had escaped detection due to its lack of residual heat despite having been in
situ less than thirty minutes. The vehicles refrigeration unit was hardly a requirement for the current area and weather the vehicle was now experiencing, and it was not an intentional stealthy addition to its manufacture either. 91
st
Tank was part of the Constanta garrison on the Black Sea coast, the ‘Florida’ of Eastern Europe, where high temperatures required specialist solutions for vehicles such as the Zeus. The ZSU-23-4 was a complex piece of machinery and notorious for overheating, even at the other climatic extreme on the often frigid Barents Sea coast. The engine overheated when stationary, as did the electrical systems, causing a shutdown, and it was therefore an operational necessity that the refrigeration unit be added to the Black Sea region units. The crew were aware of the unintended benefits to concealment even if the manufacturer at Mytishchi had not been.
Several minutes later the first Ariete main battle tanks hove into view.
The Soviet battalion commander listened to the reports of their appearance from the Zeus. He had been hoping for the entire force to continue its dash to TP32 as it had initially in reaching the hill fort in time to spoil his attack there.
“Driver, what is our fuel state?”
The answer cancelled any idea he may have entertained concerning the possibility of seeking out the Italian main body with an aggressive move back east to TP33, and surprising them with a meeting engagement.
Only three tanks had appeared which left him with the age old problem of guessing whether this was a lone unit or just the first of a larger force.
“All vehicles, advance to the tree line and engage the enemy.”
The commander of the lead Ariete saw the heat sources appear in his thermal sight above them and to the right; seizing the commander’s override he slewed the turret around to face the threat.
“GUNNER!… SABOT!…TANK..”
The enemy fired as the Ariete MBTs appeared in their sights. The lead Italian was hit three times and simply blew up. The second Ariete also received an immediate killing hit and the commanders and loaders turret hatches blew open. Like a pair of chimneys the hatches spewed smoke from the burning propellant of its own bag charges as the tank continued down the incline with its dead crew. The third Ariete had just jinked onto a new leg, the zig zag course throwing off the three gunners who had targeted it. One non-penetrating hit and two near misses had its driver suddenly reverse at an angle across the three lanes of the autobahn. It fired a sabot in reply, discharging both smoke and chaff grenades at the same time. Striking the crash barrier at speed it disappeared from view down the embankment where only swift action by its driver prevented its overturning on the steep slope.
The were no other NATO vehicles left to shoot and the T-72 to the left of the battalion commanders was pouring smoke from the turret as its crew bailed out.
He had both complete surprise and a better than three to one advantage over the Italians, so the two-for-one result was a poor one.
The second Ariete had reached the bottom of the incline and come to a halt. The fire in its turret reached the stacked HESH rounds in the lowest storage bins and explosions began tearing it apart from within.
They pulled back, retracing their route to the nearest fire break, arriving as 155mm rounds, called in by the survivor of the ambush, began landing on the edge of the lorry park. The next fall of shot landed on the right edge of the ambush position, the next in its centre and the last salvo struck the left side of the position. Expert fire control and gunnery, the Soviet commander wondered if these troops were chosen at random or were they some crack unit. He detached his last three IFVs to assist in the seizing of the autobahn over the Mitterland Kanal, and headed north with his tanks, intending to turn west again and await the remaining Arietes arrival at the bridge.
He would hit them from the rear as they counter-attacked and then he would see how good they really were.
The commander of the 13 tank did not like built up areas, it allowed a dismounted enemy to get in close, it provided countless ambush sites, and of course it robbed his M1 of its manoeuvrability.