Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

If this left hook coming from the south was successful, Supreme Allied Command Europe knew that the hundred-mile-long Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket could not retreat, the Rhine behind them cut. Yet SACEUR, in having to commit NATO forces to the south, were forced to deny the pocket vitally needed reinforcements which could provide rearguard actions to effect withdrawal from the pocket.

“You can’t give the general that!” Major Norton advised the doctor as he prepared to give Freeman a shot of Demerol to ease the pain after the operation he’d had to relieve complications of paresis.

“Why not?” asked the harried doctor.

Major Norton, whom Freeman had seconded to his G-2 staff, did not know everything about the general yet, but Al Banks had made a point of telling him early on that the general was a man who eschewed medication, boasting on occasion that the strongest pill he’d ever taken was an aspirin and that anything stronger than the medical corpsman’s APC was for “goddamned sissies.”

“Are you serious?” asked the exhausted doctor scornfully. “The pain’s acute after that surgery.”

“What exactly’s wrong with him?” asked Norton.

“He’s got paresis. Insufficient blood supply to the spinal cord. It’s a partial paralysis, but he’ll get over it. Meanwhile I’d like to make him as comfortable as I can.”

Freeman stirred, his eyes opening briefly, then closing again, his voice slow, raspy with dehydration. “Al?”

The doctor looked down at him, loudly informing him, “General — I’m going to give you a shot. It’ll ease your discomfort.”

The general tried to turn his head. “Al — what the hell’s—” He slipped back to unconsciousness. The doctor gave him the shot.

“I hope that won’t make him confused when he wakes up,” Norton admonished him.

“Well, without it, he won’t be thinking at all, Major. Anyway — it doesn’t really matter, does it? No one’s getting out of this abattoir.”

For a moment Norton thought the doctor was talking only about the hospital — until he realized the doctor meant the entire pocket. Norton had to admit to himself that the latest batch of aerial reconnaissance photos still showed no sign of Russian tanks with fuel drums attached. It confirmed Freeman’s last-minute discovery on the way back from Heidelberg that the Russian tanks were not short of gas. As soon as the front wave of Kirov’s tanks were on empty, rather than having to stop, sitting ducks for the stationary NATO tanks dug in defilade positions, already low on ammunition and with no fuel reserve, a second wave of Russian tanks would sweep forward in echelons to cover the first as they refueled.

The other members of Freeman’s staff told Norton that it was the first time in Freeman’s career that the general had ordered a defensive strategy, hoping to convert it to an offensive one when the Russians’ overextended supply line brought their tanks to a stop. Southern Command was pressing Freeman’s staff to release the tanks, arguing that they might as well rush the breaches in the DB perimeter. But without oil and the tank-killing Thunderbolts, it was adjudged by Freeman’s staff that any such move would only trade short-term gain for a massive overall loss, as well as giving away the defilade positions to the Russian choppers, which, though hampered by the blizzard conditions, were on infrared, the vacated defilade positions merely providing the Soviets with more gaps in the line.

“There are too many holes in the dike,” conceded Norton, “and not enough fingers to plug them.”

The final blow to the already rock-bottom morale of the American, British, and Bundeswehr divisions fighting for their lives in the pocket was the news that Soviet SPETS who had infiltrated the rear areas had blown up fuel reserves west of Munster and that Freeman’s mine field/defilade strategy was not working, the Russians driving prisoners before them to clear the mine fields. The choice for the prisoners had been a stark and simple one: run for your lives or get shot. In some places to the south, particularly near Leverkusen, it didn’t work, prisoners refusing to be used as human detonators. But in other areas they ran toward the lines, blown into oblivion, opening corridors for the Soviet armor-borne troops to pour through.

Allied helicopters, roughly equal in number to the Soviets’ were, in general, superior fighting machines, and for the most part, the Allied pilots could literally fly rings about their Russian counterparts, but as in the Thunderbolts’ case, the Allied choppers were short of ammunition and missiles of all types. Compounding NATO’s problems in the first few hours of Marshal Kirov’s attack was the Soviets’ dropping of nonnuclear EMP — electromagnetic pulse — bombs, knocking out all radio communications, every microchip circuit within a twenty-mile radius blown, leaving NATO’s frontline commanders without communications while Kirov’s divisions stayed in close touch with each other via Kirov’s superbly trained motorcycle courier battalions. The DB pocket was becoming an abattoir.

On Marshal Kirov’s general staff, only the marshal was worried. He held the awesome responsibility if anything went wrong, and he understood better than any of his subordinates that for all the years since World War II, and especially after the defense cuts of the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union’s victory in the West had to be a quick victory — a victory of quantity over quality — before the Americans and their damnable ability to resupply had a chance to make any difference. Still, as the battle wore on, the fact that the NATO forces were now being split in two raised to a certainty the possibility of driving them into the sea before the Americans could muster the wherewithal for a counterattack.

Shaking with cold, David Brentwood had quickly dug a shallow grave in the snow. As he dragged the Englishman’s body into the depression and removed the Englishman’s clothes, he felt as unobtrusively as he could for a cigarette lighter. There was none. Maybe it was inside the boots. But here, too, he drew a blank. He was sure he’d seen the Englishman smoking, but perhaps he’d got a light from one of the guards. He looked about for anything that he could make a rude cross from, but there was nothing. The guard was telling him to hurry up again. Quickly putting on the Englishman’s uniform and taking the Englishman’s dog tags, he heaped up the snow and placed a bramble as the only marker he could find for the makeshift grave. He bowed his head for a moment and then trudged slowly back to the ditch, slipping the dog tags over his head, forlornly carrying the snow-sodden blanket with his left hand, jumping the ditch, breaking his fall with the right.

As he got up, he threw the blanket into the guard’s face, shoved the AKM up into the air, and kicked the man in the groin. He heard the explosion of air from the Stasi as the guard fell back into the ditch, cracking the ice, David falling with him, bringing his knee up to the guard’s chin. There was a crunch of bone, and for a second David didn’t know whether it was his knee or the guard’s jaw. Either way, he finished the job with the butt of the AKM. Quickly he took the dead guard’s coat off him, but the man’s torso fell back into the broken ice so that when Brentwood reached for the man’s undershirt, it was sodden, as was the rest of his uniform. “Damn!” said David under his breath, but he did find a lighter. He could do it, he guessed, by cutting out a strip from the truck cabin’s plastic upholstery, but the problem was, he didn’t know how long it would take.

He heard voices as the men started to return from the dump. He wouldn’t have enough time to hot-wire the truck — they’d cut him down before he got behind its steering wheel.