by Ian Slater
“Fire!” Malvinsky fired at the East German back-blast position, bits and pieces, probably signed pine branches, still visible like pricks of orange snow melting on the glass of his infrared scope. Nearer the trace was a rolling fireball followed by pieces of flaming debris from the tractor. There was no human noise, the tractor stopped.
The East German fired back at Alfa’s Tower, but by then Meir and Malvinsky were halfway down the staircase and into the jeep, pulling back to the next position in the pines on their side of the strip. The East German rocket missed the tower, crashing into the pines above them, setting the trees afire and throwing long shadows across their dugout. Meir fired three scarlet emergency flares. As they burst high above Alfa One HQ, the Soviet headquarters at Zossen-Wünsdorf, using the old-fashioned radio lines, ordered “Operation Home Rule” to begin.
Twenty Soviet-Warsaw Pact divisions, infantry and four thousand tanks, began to move, preceded by hundreds of strike aircraft, primarily SU-24/Fencers for ground support and MiG-29s with air-to-air Alamo and antiradiation, antiradar air-to-surface missiles, with Russian NR-30-millimeter tank-destroying cannon, all converging on the Fulda Gap. Most of the Soviet aircraft, while visible on U.S. and European satellite pictures, were not visible to the knocked-out fiber-optical radar systems on NATO’s central front, north and south of the Fulda Gap. Here the Soviets’ AFOMs, anti-fiber-optic measures, had been most effective. Nevertheless, in response to the firing in Berlin and the flares at Outpost Alfa, NATO, as part of its “forward defense, flexible response” strategy, sent hundreds of M-1s toward the gap while concealed 155-millimeter and 203-millimeter artillery guns behind Fulda began pounding the gap through which the T-80 echelons were expected to come pouring. Heavily camouflaged tanks of the U.S. Eleventh Armored, dug in behind preselected revetment areas in defilade positions, waited should the Soviet-Warsaw Pact tanks burst through the saturating fire of the artillery. In their deep, second forward observation hole, Hans Meir and Malvinsky hunkered down by the infrared periscope, ground shaking all about them, trees trembling as the deadly artillery rained down only a quarter mile from them.
“This is it, Fritz,” said Malvinsky.
“Ja.” Meir pulled a walkie-talkie from the OP’s alert kit.
They had been taught and they understood that for them there could be no retreat; their only job, the most important of all as NATO front line OPs, was to hold as long as they could, to give situation reports vital to the artillery and tanks. To buy time. As Malvinsky stayed glued to the periscope, seeing the earth erupting before him in jagged white plumes on the infrared, he could hear Meir cranking up the minefield charge box for their sector. “Are they coming through yet?” he asked Malvinsky.
“Jes-us!” replied the American. “Have a look at this!”
General Sutherland had told them the Soviet-Warsaw Pact would most likely come through in echelons of fives, two wing-men, one either side of the three center tanks, to protect the flank. But to see his infrared’s circle blocked solid with the thermal waves of so many, to actually see more tanks than he had ever seen in his life coming straight for him, was something that no amount of live ammunition training or anything else had prepared them for. “Settle down,” said Meir, as much to himself as to Malvinsky. “Are they in our sector yet?”
“Hundred meters to go,” said Malvinsky. “Hold it.”
The forest was erupting, trees splitting all about them, the scream of hot metal shards carving up the air. Malvinsky swung the infrared scope around, and for as far as the eye could see there were thick, billowing clouds of white and the steady pomp, pomp, pomp of smoke grenades spewing from the forward tanks, whose earsplitting frenzied sound was now joined by the NATO mines as they began detonating. Meir heard the distinctive screech of tracks coming off roller wheels and the heavy metallic thumps as the mine-disabled tanks were shoved aside by those behind them, who now continued converging on the gap.
Within minutes a squadron of NATO A-10s came in low over the trees, wings rocking in their tight subsonic turns, almost like a car too powerful for its driver. Despite the rain and darkness, the A-10s performed superbly as they flew below the Russian MiGs and Fencers, their telltale “bug-eyed” twin jets, well back, and the high lizard-patterned khaki-green camouflage visible in flare light. The A-10 Thunderbolts showed astonishing virtuosity, seeming almost to hover momentarily, their noses down, the forty-two-hundred-round-per-minute, 30-millimeter cannon spitting out long orange tracer. Wherever the cannon fire struck the Russian tanks’ reactive armor, the 30-millimeter bullets disintegrated the explosive-reactive armor, destroying the cannon’s bullets before they could even penetrate the tank metal proper. But wherever the rain of orange cannon fire found the thinner-skinned turrets, it was enough to stop the tank, the air inside the vehicle a whizzing cloud of white-hot razors, many of the tanks exploding as the A-10s’ fire not only passed through the turret but superheated the tank’s own supply of ammunition by the loader. As well, most of the big American 155- and 203-millimeter self-propelled guns behind Alfa One were able to change position before the answering Soviet-Warsaw Pact batteries got a fix on them and were now tearing into the more than five hundred T-72s and T-80s that were the first to reach the Fulda Gap.
The Russian tanks now within range, the dug-in M-1s and M-60s were waiting until the last minute for their best shots to stop the Russian tanks that had survived the deluge of artillery and the assault of the U.S.-Luftwaffe Tenth Tactical Fighter Wing. At times the NATO fighters managed to penetrate the thick Russian MiG cover, below which Soviet Fencers were providing ground support for their tanks, their wings no longer swept back but in the straight lateral position as they came in low, seeking out the American A-10s.
Meir and Malvinsky knew that sooner or later they’d be overrun, no place to hide, caught between the steamrollers of the two opposing armies. Through screaming bursts of shell fire, Malvinsky was reporting tanks coming through in battalion strength, fifty at a time now that gaps in the minefield had been “ribboned out,” Russian and East German infantry having quite literally laid out fluorescent tape to mark the safe entry points through the strip. If that happened, disaster would result, with the Soviet-Warsaw Pact echelons pouring through, then splitting off into arrow formations, one right, northward towards Kassel, the other left, south to Frankfurt-am-Main, driving deep wedges into NATO’s central front.
The crisis for NATO at the moment, as Meir knew first in his forward position, was that of the fiber-optical-guided missiles. Long lauded as much cheaper than the old standard missiles, which had to carry their own expensive independent control system, the fiber-optical missiles were guided by images relayed back to a central fire control. But the fiber-optical missiles had now been neutered by the fuel/air explosions, one of which Meir and Malvinsky had seen earlier that night as a pinkish glow to the east and which had sent out pressure waves twice as powerful as that emitted by a two-kiloton nuclear bomb, the waves ineffectual against the old-fashioned clunky Russian missiles.
A motorcycle messenger sent out from Fifth Army headquarters to Alfa One was told about the fiber-optics screw-up and, hitting 120 miles an hour on the Autobahn, had taken the message back to Fifth Army HQ, which had still not heard anything directly from NATO’s commander in chief of the thirteen-hundred-kilometeR-1ong central front. Nevertheless, despite the dire situation, Fifth Army’s General Willison was refusing to unleash his “stochastic” robot mines, designed to be set loose to roam for up to four days, attaching themselves to the magnetic field of a tank, exploding with fifteen kilograms of explosive. The trouble with this plan, Willison realized, was that if the NATO forces couldn’t stop the enemy tanks at Fulda Gap and NATO tanks had to go into the Gap, then the stochastic mines would be just as much a menace to his U.S. M-1s, German Leopards, and British Challenger tanks.
* * *
The Fulda Gap was now a caldron of flying steel and volcanic earth as the Russians’ spearhead column littered the ground, many of its tanks sti
ll burning, crews dead or dying aboard, hulls of others ripped apart, but still the Russians kept coming. With a six-to-one-man ratio over NATO, the gap might still be breached, MiGs and F-15s thundering overhead in the night, contesting the space above the potential breakthrough point.
All Meir and Malvinsky, eyes red with fatigue and fear, could do was to keep changing dugout positions as much as they could, trying not to expose themselves to either enemy or “friendly” fire as they watched tracer arcing out from the M-1s, machine guns finding the range, the M-1s’ lasers put out of action either by the tanks’ own reactive armor packs exploding or direct Russian fire, over a hundred of the M-1s destroyed by East German 125-millimeter armor-piercing discarding sabot rounds, capable of piercing the M-1s’ twenty-centimeter steel.
* * *
It was now twenty minutes after two on the morning of September 3 when, because of the massive blackout of communication along NATO’s line, NATO’s European commander in Brussels, General Koch, had no alternative but to formally release, by pay telephones (those not plugged into the fiber-optic system) and dispatch riders, all sector commanders to proceed on their own initiative. He emphasized the main tenet of NATO’s “forward defense, flexible response” strategy — that the enemy should be engaged as far forward as possible to buy the desperate one week needed for the American reserves to enter the war — the nuclear option being the strategy of last resort and only permissible under the express orders of the NATO council.
For Koch, there were only two decisions he could have made: one, to do as he had done, or secondly, to defer to the NATO council. But in the time it would have taken him to convene the council, he was ordering the recall of “dual-based” troops from the United States, that is, those troops who, on paper, were in Europe but were only at half strength, an economic measure left over from the habit of bleeding the United States’ European garrisons to put reserves into Vietnam. Koch knew the decision he made to recall the dual-based troops was in effect a decision that might force the U.S. president’s hand. Unlike his NATO brief, Koch did not have the authority to move any U.S. unit higher than a forty-thousand-man corps. His request for the dual-based troops, a request that he knew would be known as quickly by Moscow as Washington, would be one that in effect would widen the war, but if not made, would make it impossible for the United States to reinforce Europe in time. Besides, if he didn’t issue the order, the Russians would see this as a weakness, and what might have been an intention simply to gobble up territory along the near front would expand anyway, encouraging the S-WP forces to press on farther into Western Europe, knowing the farther they went, the less likely it was that NATO’s nuclear option would be invoked.
Koch fully understood what it would mean for President Mayne, but historians could argue about it — if there was anything left to write about, which there wouldn’t be if the Russians broke through. The president could refuse the request, of course, but this also would be seen by Moscow as a lack of resolve, another Munich sellout, and would only encourage Moscow to grab even more territory.
* * *
When Press Secretary Trainor got the request, he was at once shaken and relieved. He and the president had been holding a decidedly gloomy discussion in the Oval Office with the Joint Chiefs about the political necessity of ascertaining whether or not the missiles that hit the Blaine were fired by NKA patrol boats or had come in via low air attack, launched by a Russian aircraft out of Cam Rahn Bay or from the southbound Soviet Far Eastern Fleet. But now the request from SACEUR— Supreme Allied Commander Europe — endorsed by CINC south and CINC north, rendered the question about who fired the missiles academic.
“The North Koreans have tripped the whole goddamned thing off anyway,” said Trainor.
A call came in from Premier Suzlov. He was demanding that Mayne order NATO to cease its fighting and surrender all territory gained by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact countries.
“Mr. Premier,” answered the president, “I don’t want this. You don’t want this. Call off your people in Korea.”
“I have no people in Korea. You have people in Korea.”
“I mean call off Pyongyang.”
“We have no people in Pyongyang. It would be interference in the internal affairs—”
“Then,” said Mayne calmly, “call off the ‘fraternal assistance’ you are giving East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia—”
“We did not begin this, Mr. President. Your act of terrorist aggression in East Berlin—”
‘ “That might well have been terrorist, Mr. Premier, but it was not an act of any government in the NATO alliance. Of this I can assure you.”
“Assure me? You can assure me of nothing. However, if you contain your NATO armies, I will agree to—”
“Mr. Premier?”
The line went dead.
“What the hell—” began Mayne.
The NSA electronic experts overseeing the White House and situation room communications punched all the right buttons, including time-of-conversation-cessation tone for number coding into the computer. Most likely explanation, they informed the president, “connections purposely cut.”
The president looked up, astounded. “By whom?”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff knew and Trainor knew they knew, but coming from them, it could look almost self-serving. It was for a moment as if each of the Joint Chiefs, aware that history was being made, did not want to come out on the wrong side of it.
“Some of Suzlov’s generals see this as their chance,” Trainor proffered quietly, adding in an even quieter but more chilling tone, “As the British would say, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound.’ “
“What in hell does that mean?” snapped the president.
“Go for broke,” Trainor answered quietly. “The NATO forces might be reeling. They won’t get another chance like this for a hundred years.”
Harry Schuman, sitting next to Admiral Horton, was nodding in agreement. “Hardliners have been fretting ever since Gorbachev’s reductions. I think Mr. Trainor is correct in his assessment.”
Mayne was rubbing his forehead. “All right, General Gray. What’ll it take?”
“Rollover, sir.” He meant the NATO policy of “Atlantic necessity,” of the U.S., British, and other NATO navies, but primarily the U.S. and British, having to accept enormous losses, simply roll over them, to get the reinforcements of men, materiel, and food to reinforce Europe if they were to have any hope of pushing the Russians back.
“Mr. President,” said Admiral Horton, “in the first hundred and eighty days we’re looking at a minimum of six thousand cargo ships. Each ship making six round trips. Means a minimum of thirty-four cargo ships a day — excluding naval battle groups for escort and carrier air cover for the convoys.”
“Can we do it?”
“We do it or we lose Europe.”
“Do it,” said Mayne.
At that moment Trainor knew that from here on in the government of the United States would function from the bombproof shelter of the White House situation room and that Senator Leyland had just lost his bid for the presidency.
* * *
On Capitol Hill, the entire place under the heaviest security ever seen in Congress, President Mayne, for purposes of national as well as European morale, made his address from the House of Representatives, as Roosevelt had done, to show Europe that both Democrats and Republicans supported him. As he mounted the podium, the silence was palpable as the speaker invited the president to address the Congress.
“This day, as you know, war has broken out in Europe. Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies have attacked the NATO alliance through the very Iron Curtain that for years past has been the front line between the forces of freedom and those of oppression. And once again the United States has been called upon to stem the tide of tyranny, a tide given its force by those in Moscow who in their unshakable Communist determination wish to rule not only the Soviet Union but the rest of the world. I have asked Premier Suzlov several times this
day through the offices of the Soviet Embassy to agree to a cease-fire by midnight tonight Washington time. Should I not receive the answer we want — that hostilities shall cease at that time, that both NATO and the Soviet-Warsaw Pact units will withdraw to the positions they occupied before hostilities began — then we must understand that a state of war exists between the United States and the Soviet Union and her allies.
“I ask you all to join with me, to pray for peace but to stand ready for war. We, like all our allies, hold our breath for all mankind, for all those on the edge of the abyss. But should it come to this, we are resolved to fight if we have to, with all the resources at our disposal. Let us be calm, but let us be firm, firm in the conviction of those Americans who have gone before us, for those Americans who went to do battle with the evils of Hitler and all those of his ilk who would make us slaves and extinguish the flame of freedom.
“Rest assured that the United States will do all in its power to bring the hostilities to a quick and peaceful end. But if our overtures of peace are rebuffed, then the fate of our children is at hand and will reside in our determination, as Americans, to stand up to a bully in the only way we know how: in the words of another American, ‘to give him a thrashing he’ll never forget.’ God bless you all.”
Trainor was stunned, as was a good part of the Congress, by born the brevity and starkness of the president’s oration. Suddenly the Congress erupted in applause as the president walked from the podium, surrounded by a standing ovation. The people, Trainor saw, had done what Americans had always done, rallied about the presidency in times of national peril.
The Secret Service contingent was unable to hold the members of Congress back as they crowded about to shake the president’s hand, but Mayne, his demeanor calm, his stride purposeful, walked up to Senator Leyland and extended his hand. For that moment in the nation’s history, following the speech, beamed all over America, time seemed to stand still and there were no Democrats or Republicans, blacks or whites, there were only Americans.