Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

The other lesson from Convoy 24 was a reminder to all NATO commanders that any man guilty of self-inflicted wounds would not only be court-martialed, but his next of kin would forfeit receipt of all military pensions. The rule, of course, was already on the books of NATO’s armies, but it was the most diplomatic way that ACLANT could think of conveying to their Japanese allies that choosing death rather than withdrawal or a surrender was not in the defensive interest of the Allied cause. The more enemy troops that the Allies could tie up with either delaying tactics or surrender, the better.

The difficulty of getting this message across, however, was compounded by the fact that, following a failed counterattack by the German Second Army and the American First against the Soviet’s southern flank ninety miles west of Prague, 321 American and West German prisoners of war had been summarily executed by the Stasi— the supposedly disbanded secret police of what was formerly East Germany, many of its members still working for Moscow.

In the darkness of the drop, all David Brentwood remembered was lining up when the green “go” light came on, the steady shuffle to the Hercules’ rear, the dark incline of the ramp-door disappearing into the vast blackness of the night. The master sergeant smacked him on the shoulder, then the jump. Tearing air so cold, he couldn’t breathe. And coming up toward them, graceful arcs of red and green tracer, crisscrossing with unhurried fluidity. The surrounding darkness was so black that though he knew his five hundred comrades must be all around him, they were invisible for the first thirty seconds.

Then he spotted several figures momentarily silhouetted in flashes of antiaircraft fire, some slumped like small toy soldiers, dead in their harness. The air was rocking violently with AA shells exploding, the acrid smell of the cordite reminding David not so much of war as of the Fourth of July. The fumes of the antiaircraft explosions, together with the pungency of burning rubber tires from several of the airborne’s Humvee trucks, threatened to overcome Brentwood as he neared the ground, his legs flailing the air in panic lest he hit stiff-limbed with his eighty-pound pack before he could take the roll.

Suddenly flares illuminated a field below, the burnt-out hulk of a barn, dead horses strewn about, the dark plum gash of a cow ripped open, its head missing, and off to the left, short, sharp stabs of bluish-white machine-gun fire. The sound of the battle increased to a crescendo at times, then fell off, small-arms fire heard in the pauses between the screams and crash of artillery and heavy 120-millimeter mortars coming in from the outer fringes of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Here the American airborne, instead of having landed within the designated drop zone in the northeastern sector of the pocket, were caught by a sudden shift in the crosswind, which swept most of them beyond the perimeter into the very barrage of the British and German batteries that were supposed to have given them covering fire.

Though David Brentwood didn’t know it then, over 270 men had been lost in the first three minutes of landing, caught in the deadly cross fire of a Polish motorized company. The irony was too grim to bear — the drop zone having been selected because intelligence overflights had confirmed that this sector, in the northeasternmost bulge of the pocket, no more than five miles across, was up against the Polish Sixth Motorized Rifle Division. The intelligence experts pointed out that the Poles, though supposedly once loyal members of the old Warsaw Pact, were, in the main, staunchly Catholic, detested the Russians, and would either desert “en masse” or at the very worst offer only token resistance and quickly surrender to Allied forces.

Such intelligence estimates proved disastrously wrong on two counts. No matter what the Poles thought, no matter how Catholic they were, how much they liked America and Americans, they and their cities were being pounded by the NATO bombers that had managed to penetrate the Soviet defense line, which now ran like a jagged cut bisecting Western Germany, swinging off to the southwest where the Soviet advance along the Danube and north to Munich had been the deepest. And no one had to tell David Brentwood after his stint in General Freeman’s celebrated raid on the capital of North Korea barely two months before that when you are being bombed and strafed, you make no distinction between friendly and hostile fire.

In addition to this, Western intelligence did not know that the Sixth Polish MR division, quite apart from wanting to protect its own skin from the Allied bombers’ counterattacks, had another much stronger incentive: the Soviet military police, who shot deserters or malingerers on the spot. It was a policy that the Russians had prepared years ago, during the gody prostakov— “sucker years”—of the Gorbachev revolution, which had swept the dizzy West off its feet. There was another inducement for the Poles to fight well.

This was called semeynoe pobuzhdenie —”family persuasion “—inspired in part by Beijing’s successful policy of 1989 through which people were encouraged to turn in counterrevolutionaries in their own family. The Soviet refinement was to take a family member, usually the very young or the elderly, for “antifascist war work” in eastern Poland. This way the Russians had it both ways: The relatives would work in the factories producing everything from electronic print boards for the fly-by-wire Soviet jets to biological/chemical weapons, including the manufacture of Tabun and the other VX gasses. A drop of VX paralyzed in seconds, producing involuntary defecation and vomiting. The Polish workers also served another function. If any of the Polish armed forces lost ground, relatives would be hanged. Shooting was too expensive, wasting precious rounds that could be put to better use on the front.

If the Polish and other Eastern European civilian workers — the Hungarians were the worst, in Moscow’s view-sabotaged anything, then the GRU simply reversed the policy and shot their kin who were serving in the armed forces. On the advice of Brig. Kiril Marchenko, adviser to the STAVKA, general headquarters of the VGK — the Soviet Supreme High Command — as well as to the Politburo, the next of kin in the armed forces selected to be punished were taken from administrative divisions wherever possible and not from the frontline spearheads.

It was a policy, however, that was not working well in Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia, the three Baltic states where the populations were so small that hostages could not be sent back to Russia proper without severely weakening the already overextended civilian labor force, most of whom were forced to work in the shipyards and munitions factories of Riga and Tallinn.

But David Brentwood knew none of the politics behind the Polish motorized division and indeed had never heard of General Kiril Marchenko or his tactics. All he knew, and was grateful for, was a soft landing in what felt like a marsh, his knees and right thigh sodden as he rose.

Quickly unclicking the harness and going into the prone position, he tucked his chin in close to the V of his Kevlar flak jacket beneath the Kevlar helmet, his web harness distributing the weight about his torso, unlike his World War II forebears, who had so often found themselves weighed down below the waist by their packs of ammunition, grenades, canteen, entrenching tool, and sidearm.

Pulling the squad automatic weapon, or SAW, back along his right side, he felt for the plastic protector at the end of the barrel, and instinctively checked with his right elbow whether his sidearm was in position. It was a ritual he had followed ever since Korea, when he had seen one man’s mud-impacted weapon blow up in his face, inflicting wounds that were worse than those suffered by his brother Ray during the North Korean missile boat’s attack on the Blaine. David, a veteran after his drop and fighting withdrawal in the hit-and-run raid on Pyongyang, also carried an unofficial sidearm, a sawn-off five-cartridge pump-action shotgun in a closed, swivel-mounted canvas holster on his left side.