by Walt Gragg
Sixty-five of the seventy-three men and women of Delta Battery, 1st “Cobra Strike” Air Defense Artillery Battalion, hurried to back up the 82nd Airborne.
Having finished taking on a load of women and children, two commercial airliners taxied onto the runway. Without waiting for clearance, they roared down the asphalt and soared into the skies. Both pilots reported there were enemy soldiers everywhere they looked on the ground below. On the tarmac, a third airliner was being refueled. Its passenger manifest of over two hundred were running from the overflowing terminal. They rushed to board the waiting plane.
In the terminal building, thousands more were in near panic as the sounds of battle raged around them. Six air policemen burst through the doorway. They tossed M-4s to the four airmen working inside the terminal.
“Down! Everybody down!” an air policeman yelled. The air police raced back outside to take up defensive positions.
On the wide tarmac, a parachutist brought his missile up to his shoulder. He fired at a refueling C-17 cargo plane. The C-17 burst into flames. The fuel truck sitting next to the plane was soon consumed by the growing inferno. The thunder of the exploding truck could be heard for miles around. Flames spread across the far end of the tarmac. Black, noxious smoke covered a broad area. A second Russian took aim and fired at the huge C-5 next in line. The giant plane erupted. The roaring tarmac fires were soon out of control.
In the base housing area, a vile street fight sprang up. With women and children cowering in their homes, parachutists and airmen battled from house to house. But the Americans were no match for the enemy’s superior numbers and fighting ability. They fell back, taking as many of the dependents with them as they could.
Things had grown critical on the flight line. Now in command of the entire area, the Russians methodically destroyed the eight airplanes they found sitting on the ground. The last to fall was the commercial airliner. With a shoulder-mounted missile, a parachutist blew the refueling aircraft apart. On board, every one of the women and children were killed.
Near the rear gate, the lightly armed soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division fought with incredible bravery. They clawed at the Russians with everything they had, clinging to their defensive positions under ever-increasing pressure from their merciless opponent. They knew they had no chance against the power of the overwhelming enemy.
The BMDs broke through the beaten burgundy berets. They rushed down the tree-shrouded road. The three Stinger teams of the Patriot battery stood in the middle of the roadway. As one, the Stinger gunners fired at the oncoming BMDs. The air-defense missiles were as devastating against the armored vehicles as they would have been against a MiG. A wall of flames rose at the front of the Russian column.
The blow from the Stingers didn’t even slow the parachutists down. They slammed their combat vehicles into the burning barrier and shoved their dying comrades into the woods. The Stinger teams hurriedly prepared to fire a second missile.
• • •
Three miles north of Rhein-Main, the commander of the German provisional guard battalion protecting Frankfurt International Airport watched the thickening clouds of smoke rising in the morning sky. He heard one tumultuous explosion after another from the American air base. The German leader listened to the sounds of the nearby battle. He braced his National Guard unit for an assault against Frankfurt Airport. After forty-five minutes, with no attack on his position and no enemy in sight, the German commander gambled. He ordered half his force, two companies of his armored unit, to move south to reinforce the Americans at Rhein-Main.
It was a decision that could potentially change the course of the battle. The Americans were falling back in every corner of the base. They faced certain defeat. But sixteen immensely powerful Leopard 2 tanks, supported by a company of mechanized infantry, were on their way. In fifteen minutes, they’d arrive at Rhein-Main’s main gate.
• • •
Thirty parachutists moved toward the passenger terminal. The six air policemen defending the terminal building opened fire. The first volley from the airmen dropped a third of the enemy. Even so, the Russians came on.
The parachutists fired their automatic weapons at the air police guarding the terminal. Struck repeatedly by rifle fire, every plate-glass window on the south side of the building erupted at nearly the same instant. Shards of jagged glass leaped from the exploding windows. They tore into the frightened masses huddled together on the terminal floor. The screams of a thousand terrified voices filled the crowded building.
Eight adults and four children lay dying from the razor-sharp storm that poured down upon their heads. The blood of fifty others fell upon the cold tile.
One by one, the Russians eliminated the air policemen protecting the building. As the last American outside fell, two parachutists raced toward the terminal. Each carried a fragmentation grenade in a sweating palm. They burst through the terminal door.
It happened in slow motion. Yet it happened in the blink of an eye. The first pulled the pin on his grenade. He lobbed it into the middle of the room. The second hesitated. He realized in an instant what the pair had stumbled upon. He refused to follow his countryman’s lead and attack the defenseless throng. The grenade remained in his hand. The parachutists turned and ran back toward the door. Shooting over the heads of the women and children, the airmen inside the terminal opened fire on the fleeing figures. Bullets ripped into the pair. The Russians slammed into the shattering glass door and were impaled upon its broken pieces.
The live grenade lay on the floor a dozen feet from where, ten hours earlier, Linda Jensen and her daughters had sat waiting for their names to reach the top of the manifest.
The closest airman was thirty feet from the grenade. He threw his rifle down. The airman hurdled the frightened masses blocking his path. He lunged toward the grenade. He had to get to it before it was too late.
He nearly made it.
As he reached out his hand to grasp the waiting time bomb, its five-second fuse expired. The resulting explosion sliced the airman into a thousand pieces. Deadly steel fragments ripped through the building. For thirty yards in every direction, the angel of death came to call.
• • •
Near the back gate, the final surviving Stinger team fired a third missile. Another BMD erupted beneath a missile’s lethal nose. And for the third time, the Russians came on. The soldiers of the Patriot battery tried to rally once more. It was, however, no use. There was nothing they could do to stop the irrepressible Russian tidal wave that washed over them. When it was over, only fourteen of the American air defenders would still be alive.
The breakthrough at the rear gate was complete. The parachutists’ vehicles roared through the trees toward their objectives. The time had come to finish the destruction of Rhein-Main and put an end to the uneven struggle. With their victory at the rear gate, the Russian commander was convinced nothing could stop his regiment from the successful completion of its mission. The total destruction of the American air base was minutes away.
The German tanks sped through the main gate. The armored personnel carriers of the German infantry were close behind. The Leopards burst onto the runway.
The Russian column broke free from the woods. Sixteen German main battle tanks were waiting. Undaunted, the parachutists charged straight for their ancient enemy.
Shell after shell ripped into the Russian vehicles. Still, the parachutists continued their maniacal rush from the forest. A meager response with a few Bastion missiles and their 100mm main guns was all they could muster against the German tanks’ overwhelming power. With glee, the Leopards slaughtered hundreds of the cocksure invaders of their homeland.
In their armored personnel carriers, the German infantry started hunting down the remaining parachutists. The surviving Americans soon joined in. A rout was under way. But this time it was the parachutists who’d come up short. The Russians fell
back. Finally willing to accept defeat, two hundred parachutists melted into the deep woods on the southern and western ends of the base. Fifteen hundred of their comrades hadn’t been so lucky.
The cost in American lives had been tremendous. But bloodied and battered, Rhein-Main still stood.
• • •
Thirty yards to Rios’s left, four parachutists rushed the chain link. They knelt at the base of the fence and furiously cut at the wire.
“Get them!” Rios screamed.
Wheatley and Velasquez signaled their understanding. Velasquez provided covering fire. Wheatley rolled onto his side, pulled the pin on a grenade, and leaped to his feet. He hurled the deadly grenade. It sailed over the fence and rolled to a stop a few feet from the Russians. In a blinding flash, the parachutists were torn apart.
Wheatley lay on his back in a pool of scarlet snow. He’d never know of the success of his efforts. The firing of a dozen rifles had cut the exposed airman down moments after he threw the grenade.
Then there were five.
• • •
North of Ramstein, the A-10s ripped into the Russian light armor with all the fury of the deepest pits of hell. With their cannons blazing, they made pass after pass. The Americans cut the attackers down to size. Death-filled plumes reached into the endless heavens.
And one after another, Russian air-defense weapons knocked the determined Warthogs from the sky. Neither side would concede an inch in the life-and-death struggle unfolding a few miles from the critical American air base. Second by second, the unspeakable angst grew.
Eleven minutes after the A-10s pounced, one hundred Russian vehicles lay burning outside Ramstein. Four hundred paratroopers were dead. And the twisted wreckage of every A-10 was smoldering in the snows. Six rescue helicopters attempted to follow up on the Warthogs’ successes. Yet just as at Spangdahlem, they were brushed from the sky without a second thought.
One hundred and fifty combat vehicles moved toward their objective.
• • •
To Rios’s right, two primary bunkers were wiped out at nearly the same instant. A pair of .50-caliber machine guns were gone. Two hundred yards of chain link was wide open. The Russians rushed forward. They broke through the wire in front of the defeated positions. Thirty parachutists were quickly inside. They fanned out, determined to crush the final pockets of resistance on the eastern fence.
Mortar shells rained down upon the remaining Americans. Wide craters pockmarked the eastern end of the runway. Velasquez never heard the round that landed inside his bunker.
Now there were just four.
CHAPTER 32
January 29—9:05 a.m.
102nd Parachute Regiment
The Rhine River Valley
The Rhine River valley is some of the most beautiful country on the planet. Covered in a black forest of evergreens thicker than found anywhere in America, deep mountain gorges cut by the proud river run for hundreds of miles as the lazy waters meander from Switzerland to the Atlantic Ocean. In the south, the river separates France and Germany. In the north, it runs through Germany’s largest cities on its scenic journey to the sea.
The six thousand four hundred men of the 102nd Parachute Division weren’t nearly enough to take and hold the bridges in the heavily populated areas to the north. They weren’t even going to try. They had a single task: cut the broad bridges in the south, separating France and Germany. In all, there were twenty bridges between the two countries. Six major expanses were absolutely critical to the parachutists’ plan.
They would do whatever was necessary to seize the six bridges. Once they were within their grasp, at the first sign of trouble, all six would be destroyed. The division would also take and hold as many of the smaller bridges as they could. Those they couldn’t ensnare would be damaged to the point where they’d be of no further use to the enemy.
The Russians anticipated stiff resistance from the Germans on the eastern side of the spans and from the French on the western ends. But in the first confusing hours of the war, even the most valuable of the bridges was being guarded by a handful of lightly armed German provisional guards.
The parachutists swooped down into the Rhine valley like the Mongol hordes. Six hundred attacked each of the major bridges, overwhelming the outmanned guards. In minutes, the Russians eliminated the German defenders. They controlled the eastern approaches to each of the major spans. The parachutists started working their way across the wide bridges. They had no idea what they’d find waiting for them on the French side. Cautiously, the Russians moved forward.
Leapfrogging from position to position, the blue berets neared the far ends.
The western sides had been abandoned. The three customs agents at each border checkpoint had fled at the first sound of gunfire. The Russians started preparing fortified positions on both ends. Demolition teams rushed to ready each for destruction at the first sign of trouble.
Groups of two hundred attacked the fourteen smaller spans. Within a half hour, twelve were in Russian hands. The final two had been destroyed.
Ninety minutes after their arrival on German soil, the parachutists held the southern half of the Rhine River. The fortification of their positions was rapidly undertaken. One way or another, the French would never be allowed to set foot on any of the bridges. And the Germans would never be allowed to take any of them back.
After little more than ten hours of war, a direct attack east by the French army was an impossibility.
Five powerful French armored divisions would arrive at the great river as the sun soared high on the war’s first full day. Rather than attacking the Russians holding the spans or heading north to cross into Germany in areas still in Allied hands, the French also began digging in, creating immense defensive positions on the western side of the Rhine. It was quite apparent that the French had little taste for the monumental fight unfolding to the east. Defending Germany, especially a Nazi Germany, wasn’t something over which they truly cared to spend even a single drop of their young men’s blood.
Despite the fervent pleas and unrelenting political pressure applied by the British and Americans, they would never join in the fight.
• • •
A parachutist grimaced in anguish as a trio of machine-gun bullets ripped into his upper body. Rios’s eighth kill of the morning fell into the snows.
The number of invaders inside the fence was continuing to swell. Half of the sixty airmen assigned to protect the eastern perimeter were dead. In the center of the fence line, a single American machine gun remained. A score of parachutists concentrated their fire on Rios’s position, pinning the Americans down. The blue berets worked their way across the runways, intent on surrounding the last real opposition.
“Rios, they’re getting around behind us!” Goodman yelled.
“Keep firing into the woods. I’ll do what I can to stop the ones inside the fence.”
Rios grabbed the heavy machine gun. Cradling the weapon’s smoking barrel in his arms, he picked it up and swung it around so he could fire upon the enemy advancing on the right. The red-hot barrel burned through Rios’s clothing. The nerves on his forearms screamed as his skin began to fry. He slammed the gun down in its new position.
BMDs rammed through Ramstein’s northern and western gates at the same instant. The air police focused everything they had on stopping the enemy before they could gain access to the base.
LAW missiles ripped through the air. Machine-gun fire tore into the parachutists. A chorus of explosions filled the morning. And as at Spangdahlem, the American defenses weren’t nearly enough. The Russians never hesitated. They continued to apply wave after wave of intense pressure on the air police.
Within eight horrific minutes, the resistance at both gates had crumpled. The parachutists poured onto Ramstein.
A grenade landed at Wright’s feet as he fought on alone in t
he sandbags to Rios’s right.
Then there were only three.
• • •
At the same moment that their countrymen moved to destroy the NATO air bases, a few miles outside Kaiserslautern another parachute regiment advanced on the last of America’s critical assets.
Two divisions of armored equipment sat in endless rows inside a giant supply depot. More than five hundred M-1 tanks and an equal number of Bradley Fighting Vehicles waited to be claimed by American units arriving from the States. There were a thousand Humvees armed with machine guns or TOW missiles and endless formations of trucks. One hundred and forty-four Apache helicopters sat in the snows, along with twice as many Black Hawks and Kiowas. Artillery pieces and air-defense weapons also were positioned in lengthy lines, poised for the Americans to come and take them. Each piece of equipment had been superbly maintained. Each was armed and battle-ready.
A company of military police, a little less than two hundred men, guarded the depot. As the confident parachute regiment poured down from the early-morning sky, that was all they expected to encounter. Intelligence had confirmed those facts five hours earlier. What the regiment had no way of knowing was that minutes after their departure from the Ukraine, a battalion of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, accompanied by two companies from the 24th Infantry Division, had arrived at the depot to outfit themselves for battle. The Americans, having endured an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic and an additional three to make their way the sixty miles from Rhein-Main to Kaiserslautern, were in an extremely foul state of mind and more than ready to take it out on anything that crossed their path.
Seventeen hundred marauders were advancing on the pre-positioned supplies. They believed they’d find a small, determined force of MPs fighting with nothing larger than Humvees. What they were going to encounter, however, were two hundred MPs, eleven hundred American airborne soldiers armed with TOW missiles and machine guns, along with nearly four hundred soldiers from the 24th Infantry in the Bradley Fighting Vehicles they’d drawn from the depot.