Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

This meant that the British and American troops fighting in western Germany knew they were not fighting just to defend Europe but for their loved ones. Some French intelligence sources hinted that a ranking officer in the Bundeswehr, long unhappy about the fact that American and British civilians, “even their pets,” were to be given priority on preordained evacuation routes, had purposely dispatched a battalion of Einzel KA MPF — West Germany’s Ranger troops — to blow the bridges. But as in all wars, rumors abounded, and whether the French were correct, it was impossible to say.

Rumor or not, the predicament of the British and American dependents was certainly stiffening their resistance. The question was, however, would beleaguered American and British divisions fighting side by side with the Bundeswehr, Dutch, and Belgian troops be sufficient to turn the tide?

The rapidly changing fronts over the entire length of Germany were new in the annals of war, for while fast-moving armor and motorized infantry had been the most marked feature of modern wars to date, especially the Arab/Israeli Wars, never had armor or infantry moved so quickly on such a vast scale. And never had men had to endure such sustained and furious attack on a battlefield bristling with such a range of terrible weapons. The old definitions of “battle fatigue” were no longer useful. The stress levels were so intense, yet so fluid, that save for the Battle of Britain and the lot of German pilots attacking the aerial armadas of American Superfortresses in the final days of World War II, this kind of stress was hitherto unknown in the history of battle. It meant that whereas in the 1940s men could, in a pinch, be left on the battlefield for weeks, even months, now endurance was measured only in days — often, as with the tank crews, in hours.

For over two months Leonhard Meir and the two elderly couples he had tried to take out with him had lived in a roller coaster of uncertainty as the normally well-ordered Stasi police did not seem to know what to do with them. At first they were told they must stay inside, a twenty-four-hour curfew in effect, but then they had been issued brown passbooks allowing them to go outside but no farther man two kilometers.

At Allied headquarters in Brussels, the punishing cost in pilots trying to keep the Soviet-supply lines through eastern Germany closed could no longer be justified. It was clear that if NATO kept losing pilots at this rate, the equation would turn, especially with the enormous stockpiling of arms and materiel SATINT showed was going on in Berlin, the Russians in effect holding the Berliners as hostages in as coldblooded a calculation as the NKA’s General Kim had made in his advance down the beleaguered Korean peninsula.

From southern Germany Second German Corps, consisting of a badly mauled armored division and mountain brigade, fighting next to Seventh and Fifth American Corps, were requesting WFS — weapons-free status — for the mobile, nuclear-tipped Lance missile batteries, which, other than chemical weapons, were considered NATO’s land weapon of last resort. Permission was denied, though the Lances were authorized to fire as many conventional warheads as “deemed necessary,” NATO’s way of signaling its commanders that stockpiles were rapidly diminishing.

Ironically, 130 miles behind the western front, Berlin had been one of the safest places in the opening stages of the war. The Soviet divisions and fighter squadrons situated between the city and western Germany protected the inhabitants from NATO bombing — the area so heavily armed that as well as the central front being festooned with SAM sites, some farmers, members of Stasi reserves, had been issued with the deadly hand-held Soviet SAM-7Ds, so that low-level attacks had become increasingly dangerous. And yet NATO HQ knew the buildup of supplies in Berlin must somehow be checked.

Battling his boredom, Leonhard Meir had started to take much more notice of his surroundings and discovered that the northern suburb of Lübars, where he was being kept along with his elderly acquaintances, could actually take on the air of a rural village, its crossed wooden gateposts and ornamental fences reminding Meir of his country childhood.

Perhaps it was the air, the pervasive smell of stored hay in the farms all about the city, with the soft tones of autumn, that reminded him of another age. If you ignored the jets— the two elderly couples seemed to have no trouble doing this — you could even delude yourself at times that you were on a farm.

At first Leonhard felt ashamed because the older people seemed more able to stand the strain of not knowing what was going to happen. Even the old man who had panicked in the car and had not wanted to return to the city now seemed calmer than he. But what Leonhard Meir didn’t realize was that the old peoples’ hearing had deteriorated to the point that they simply didn’t hear many of the jets. Even so, Meir saw things were changing; morale began slipping rapidly in proportion to the depletion of their canned food stocks and the introduction of severe rationing, all farms’ produce being claimed by the Russian authorities. For a while, supplies of canned goods had held out, and the fall having been reasonably mild to this point meant that some of the late vegetables were also available, though these, too, very quickly ran out. Still, for a time, the Berliners’ renowned sense of humor, never entirely understood by most other Germans, who had never lived surrounded in a Communist sea, had held. Then, when all reserves were gone, shops looted, the sense of humor began to wane — even around the outer suburbs such as Lübars, closer to farms than the inner suburbs. It became evident that “old” Berliners, especially those who had lived in what had once been the old, Western sector, were expendable.

It was on a Friday morning, one of the old men complaining again about how they had become prisoners in their own apartment, that Leonhard first sensed a resentment of his presence. Once grateful to him for trying to get them out of Berlin, the two couples now saw him as merely another mouth to feed.

Going for a walk to let things cool off a little, Meir pondered how long it would be, if ever, before he’d have any knowledge of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, let alone his son, who had been stationed at Fulda. But he was determined not to let the depression overwhelm him, always telling himself that tomorrow would see some small improvement. Surely the war couldn’t last much longer. All the experts had said that another war couldn’t last very long. Just as they had told the world Adolf Schicklgruber wouldn’t last long.

Meir heard the village clock strike noon and set his watch ten minutes ahead, an old habit he’d developed on his shoe salesman’s route to make sure he was never late for appointments.

At that moment a squadron of twenty-four British Canberra Mk-8 bombers were taking off from Greenham Common in southern England, their yellow lightning flash insignias either side of the RAF’s blue-circled red bull’s-eye streaked with water from a passing shower. Their target was Berlin.

MiG fighters scrambled in northern Holland, flying out over the hook high above the North Sea.

Seeing the blips of ten MiGs fifty miles east of him, the squadron leader of the twenty-six Canberra bombers crossing the North Sea called for interceptor assist. This wasn’t necessary, however, as RAF ground radar on England’s south coast had already dispatched six aquamarine, bullet-nosed “Tigers” out over East Anglia into a fish-scaled sky to do battle with the MiGs. The Canberras’ commander looked out across his bomber’s wide, stubby-looking wings and, seeing heavy cloud cover over Holland, instructed his pilots that the squadron would detour farther south, below the hook of Holland, which arced like a left-handed scythe toward Germany, then go in for the attack south of Hannover. The Canberras’ navigators recalculated, under instructions from the wing commander to use Magdeburg, twenty-three miles east of the old West/East German line, as the IAP, initial aiming point, for the bombing run on Berlin.