ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through'

by FARMAN, ANDY

  Neither had battle damage, they were here because both had been subjected to minimal maintenance in the underground storage facility at Bicester, and machinery does not like being idle.

  He looked around for crewmen to ask who they were for but failed to see any. The pry bar wielder provided the answer. “Replacements sir, for your regiments C Squadron. Transporters dropped them off this afternoon and we’ve been changing the engine packs, but the crews for them didn’t turn up.” The young soldier gave a shrug before carrying on.

  “I heard they got taken out by an airstrike just down the road…shit happens, eh sir?”

  Yes, Mark Venables had to agree with that one, but he had more immediate concerns that took priority over talking philosophy.

  “Have they sent anyone else?”

  “No sir, no spare crew left to send.”

  Venables had some men without tanks although not enough to make up a complete crew, but unfortunately that would probably change. A quick call had 2 Troops Sunray and his men heading back toward the REME workshop. He called up C Squadrons commander, they were not yet in action and he had no one to collect the two machines so he raised no objections. By the time that was complete, so were the repairs and the Challenger II headed off to reload.

  As the Czech’s closed to within 2000m the wire guided missiles criss-crossed the intervening distance. Artillery again fell on the NATO positions but it was light, lacking the weight of its opening barrages and 23rd MRRs commander was troubled, still he was being given evasive answers and the time had come to take his queries higher as to the pathetic artillery and air support. He had a pair of helicopters supporting him, a Mi-24 Hind-D and a Mi-28N Havoc, although being far from unwelcome, could not carry the same ordnance load of that of a regiment of ground attack aircraft.

  “Get me division.” He ordered his radio operator.

  “Do you want to speak to the operations officer again, sir?”

  “No, I want the divisional commander.” His patience had run out.

  “No one else, understand?”

  The radio operator did understand and pestered his opposite number for several minutes before handing a headset and hand-mike across. 23rd’s commander slipped the headset on and put the microphone to his mouth, pressing the send switch and dispensing with radio protocol and deference to rank, as he got straight to the point.

  “Where’s my artillery and air support?”

  From the other end of the transmission he received a rebuke as to his lack of respect.

  “Remember who it is you are talking to Colonel!” The Romanian snapped before continuing.

  “You of all people should know how easy it is for someone of your current position to be removed.” As threats went it could not have been clearer.

  “If your advance becomes any slower that may quite swiftly come to pass!”

  23rd’s regimental commander was neither cowed nor apologetic.

  “So have you checked your own six o-clock position lately, sir?”

  There was a pause before a response was forthcoming, and he could imagine the Romanian peering anxiously back over his shoulder at his own second in command. It almost made him smile.

  “112th MRR should be appearing on your right flank at any moment now, they at least advance as armoured troops should, with speed……….111th is coming up on your left and 93rd Tanks is coming up behind in support.”

  There was a further short pause and then the Romanian went on.

  “They will have the same level of artillery and air support as your men, which is little for the time being because there has been a foul up, ammunition is not coming forwards and the gun line’s must conserve what they have until the problem is resolved.”

  It was a logical reason for why the fire had been so fitful, but it hardly explained the absence of the air forces fixed wing aircraft.

  23rd MRRs rotary wing assets were working together, seeking out AAA vehicles. They had already destroyed two Royal Artillery vehicles; Stormer AFVs carrying Starstreak launchers in place of a 30mm Bushmaster cannon and turret. They were working a third, the smaller Havoc popping tantalisingly in and out of cover in an attempt to draw out the British vehicle into a position where the deadly Hind-D could engage and destroy it. This work was dangerous and demanding but helicopter crews were veterans. The greatest threat to their survival came from enemy fixed wing aircraft but the on-station A-50 Mainstay was sending a data feed showing that there were none within AMRAAM range of this portion of the battlefield at that specific time. The quality of early warning was not what the men at the front wished for, but losses in AWAC aircraft had made the Generals extremely cautious in risking those assets that still remained. The A-50s were so far to the rear that there would be less than a minutes warning of an inbound air raid, but that was sufficient for the men in the Hind-D and Havoc who kept a weather eye on the radar display as they hunted.

  23rd’s commander was still sat atop his own command vehicle observing the battlefield and trying to extract the reason for the conspicuous absence of the remainder of the air force, when the Mi-24 was transformed into a rapidly expanding ball of flame and shredded pieces of aircraft. A split second later the Havoc followed suit, the wreckage falling onto the bank of a small stream.

  The Mainstays warning came a full minute later, and once that warning was given it shut down and dived to the east, away from the AIM-54 Phoenix missiles that had downed the attack helicopters.

  Having launched on the helicopters at 180km, three flights of F-14D Tomcats of USS Gerald Ford’s former air wing closed to 45km before following through with AGM-88C HARMs, and finally engaging the Soviet CAP with AIM-120 AMRAAMs.

  Aboard Crystal Palace Zero Eight, Ann-Marie watched three pairs of US Navy F/A-18s pass below the dogfights and take out their primary target, the Romanian divisional headquarters that had spent too much time on the air and too little on the road, thereby allowing itself to be DF’d. The Tomcats HARMs had not been able to completely suppress the Soviet AAA, of the four surviving Hornets that went on to attack their secondary targets, the divisions gun and mortar lines, only two would return to friendly lines.

  CHAPTER 7

  North of Magdeburg: Same time.

  The western bank of the river at the Soviet bridgehead rose quite steeply for sixty feet and flattened out for two hundred metres before rising again as a low hillside for a further two hundred. To prevent erosion the soil had been seeded with a hardy, long rooted variety of grass and conifers had also been planted five years before for extra binding of the earth.

  Armies tend not to be particularly eco-friendly especially when on the move and this one had bulldozed its way up from the river’s edge and away inland. The natural routes up the slopes to open country had been turned into quagmires by countless tracked armoured vehicles and in order to accommodate the wheeled logistical support transports, fresh routes were created by the engineers using chain saws on the young trees, before laying roadways of steel mesh matting across ground undamaged by the armour, up to the nearest metalled road. The result was one less of managed landscape and more of a construction site, with just the odd tree remaining here and there amid the morass of mud and metal.

  When the Rzeszów Motor Rifle Division had crossed the Elbe it left a detachment of its engineers behind at the river, as had other divisions, where they could continue the building of further bridges and maintain the existing ones. Twenty-nine pontoon and ribbon bridges had been thrown across the Elbe irregularly spaced so that some were as close as thirty metres from their neighbour whilst others were several hundred metres apart. Speed rather than uniformity had been the prime force driving their construction the night before, to get men and vehicles across in sufficient numbers to establish a secure perimeter on the far bank before NATO could counter attack. The Soviet engineers working on the bridge furthest upstream, the autobahn bridge, had succeeded in spanning the gaps blown in the original roadway by British Royal Engineers, and the first tanks
had crossed the bridge by the light of the dawn. That bridge had stood for all of an hour, Turkish F-4s had knocked down the temporary spans along with three pontoon bridges, at terrible cost to themselves especially as all the bridges had been repaired or replaced within two hours.

  On each occasion that NATO aircraft had attacked, several bridges had been temporarily put out of action, but the attackers themselves had been hacked from the skies.

  The company commander of 43rd MRRs engineer company had charge of four of the bridges, of which one was closed for repair and maintenance at any given time, but the weight of traffic had taken its toll on all of the temporary constructions. For twelve hours the bridges had been at maximum capacity as fifteen divisions had crossed onto the western bank of the Elbe. Once the bulk of the armour, headquarters echelons, and divisional logistic and combat support units had crossed, and convoys had moved the various divisions supply dumps over to the west of the river he had to take three of the bridges out of service for some emergency TLC. This remaining bridge was for east to west traffic and its approaches, as with every one of the river crossings, was marked at intervals showing it to be either an ‘Up’ or ‘Down’ route and field police checkpoints out of sight of the river were enforcing the correct flow of traffic.

  On the eastern bank, close to the flowing waters, a temporary heliport had taken shape. Served by the helicopter regiments ground support vehicles it had managed a quick turnaround for aircraft requiring only reloads and fuel, but demand had outstripped available fuel stocks so a pair of Havocs and three Hind-Ds were on the ground there now, their engines shut down, the metal ticking as it cooled and contracted. The crews had gathered at a field kitchen were they sipped at scalding coffee and wolfed down hot food as they waited.

  Security on the ground for the bridgehead was a fraction of that employed on air defence, the AAA sites were in evidence wherever anyone cared to look but less than a battalion of infantry and two companies of military police were forming the immediate perimeter. The land war had moved on and this area was now secure from ground attack, that was the official line, and no one had dared to ask why only fifteen divisions had crossed to the west of the Elbe, no one asked the nature of the business that was keeping three divisions tied up east of the river.

  Outside of the General Staff and of course those units engaged in trying to unseat NATO Airborne forces from positions in their rear, it was not common knowledge that many of the most direct supply lines from the east had been cut, in fact for those in the know to be caught talking about it was to invite summary execution for the offence of defeatism.

  There was a fairly steady flow of trucks going east to bring up more stores and war stocks, replenishment for the divisional depots, and ambulances were much in evidence too, but busy with a multitude of tasks the Major of Engineers did not notice that the traffic from east to west should have been heavier. His world was filled with the noise of metal on metal, tools being wielded in manual labour and the sound of his men exerting themselves in order to have the bridges fit to carry traffic once more and themselves back on dry land, close to the trenches for when NATO fighter bombers came visiting again.

  A locking pin for one of the bridging sections had become bent and required changing before it sheared, the major and a sapper were employing muscle power to take the tension off the joint connecting both sections. They were using a manual winch attached to a length of steel hawser, anchored at one end to the other section, and it required their combined weight to take up the slack, working as they were against the rivers pull. Two other sappers were over the side of the bridge, suspended by safety lines over the water as they attempted to extract a banana shaped pin from a long straight hole. After fifteen minutes of sweat, the pounding by hammers and the grunting of obscenities aimed at the god of inanimate objects the offending item came free and was swiftly replaced. The major leant, panting and perspiring against the fender of the utility vehicle which carried much of the ancillary equipment, including the winch they had used. As the pin checkers pulled themselves back onto the road bed and moved along the bridge to the next section, he waved away an offered cigarette and looked toward the western horizon, judging that they had less than an hour’s daylight remaining. Because he was looking in that direction he saw the vehicles at the top of the furthest rise, the sun was behind them and he had to use a hand to shade his eyes.

  “What are those morons doing coming east on a westbound route?” He was speaking to himself but his companion stared in the direction his company commander was looking.

  “Maybe the MP’s are asleep, sir?”

  Asleep or not he couldn’t allow the vehicles onto the wrong bridge and he despatched the sapper to direct them in the right direction. The soldier jogged along the bridge towards the western bank and the major wiped the sweat from his eyes with a sleeve before fishing a water bottle from a pouch on his belt. He took only enough to rinse out his mouth, gargling briefly before spitting the fluid into the fast flowing waters of the river and replacing the bottle securely. A line of a dozen fuel trucks escorted by BTR-70s, was making its way slowly west across the bridge upstream of the one on which he was stood, he studied the way the bridge sections reacted to the load with a critical eye. It needed some serious work done on it before long or it was going to come apart, but that was a problem to be addressed by the Bulgarian engineers who owned it, not him.

  Looking back towards the western bank he noticed that the vehicles on the skyline had not moved down towards the river, but some of them were moving left and right, away from the line of march so perhaps they had managed to work it out for themselves unassisted. By shading his eyes again he could now see that the traffic appeared to be tanks, so they had to be well and truly lost to have arrived back at the bridgehead.

  His sapper had trudged halfway up the bank but had then stopped, turning and running back down the slope, losing his footing at one point and was now back on the bridge, waving his arms but the major could not hear what was being shouted. He looked back up at the crest at one of the tanks traversing the skyline, and saw that its main gun was pointing towards the bridge carrying the fuel convoy. Understanding came to him just before gun smoke spouted from its muzzle.

  The 120mm HESH round screamed above the line of vehicles to strike the rearmost, the BTR at the convoy’s tail end. A second round struck the lead vehicle, another BTR and left it burning, blocking the way for the trucks.

  The Leclerc tanks of the French 8th Armoured Brigade on the high ground above the river started what would be a steady and systematic bombardment to destroy the bridgehead.

  Machine gun fire cut down the running sapper and realising the position they were now in the major ran to the downstream side of the bridge, tearing off his belted equipment and steel helmet as he shouted a warning to his men. The unseen machine gunner switched fire to the running officer and the cracking sound of high velocity rounds passing close by spurred on the major who dived headlong into the frigid water. A tank round exploded the fuel truck at the head of the line now trapped by the wrecked and burning BTRs that had been the escort. Needing no further encouragement the sappers of the 43rd’s engineer company followed their commanders lead, leaping off whichever bridge they happened to be on and swimming for it.

  A short, vicious battle took place between the French and Soviet infantry backed up by the barrelled AAA sites the dug in Soviet’s would have the advantage if they had time to recover from the surprise. ZSU-23-4 self-propelled AAA vehicles turned their quadruple cannon on the French and where they had no effect upon the main battle tanks, they were devastating against the lightly armoured French AMX-10P Infantry Fighting Vehicles and the infantry debussing from them. The French infantrymen used Milan, grenades, their vehicles 21mm cannon, and sheer guts to silence the ZSUs before fixing bayonets and beginning the business of trench clearing. Meanwhile on the far bank the crews of the attack helicopters had run to their machines once it was clear the bridgehead was under ground as
sault. Fingers flew over switches and the machines began to hum as batteries fed current to starter motors, the humming changed to a heightening whine that preceded the sight of rotor blades beginning to turn, but oh so slowly. The Hind-D nearest the field kitchen was not surprisingly the one most likely to take to the air first. The helicopters rotor blades had just begun to move with a blur when the French finally noticed them, and turrets began to swivel in the direction of the sound of the turbines.

  A tank round exploded on the landing field and the first helicopter took to the air as if startled into flight by the detonation of high explosive. It’s was the speedier of the trio of Hind’s and it rose to ten feet, pivoted in the air to line up on a gap between two clumps of trees at the edge of the landing field and adopted a nose down attitude in order to gain airspeed more quickly. It was struck by a chance shell, the 120mm HESH round severed the tail and sent the aircraft cartwheeling into the ground where it caught fire. The French armour got the range of the machines still spooling up, wrecking them before they could get off the ground.

  Satisfied that all the attack helicopters were taken care of the tanks moved on, seeking fresh targets and leaving a scene where black smoke boiled up from a field occupied by twisted and ruined airframes, exploding ammunition and burning fuel.

  The major of engineers didn’t fight the current; he allowed it to carry him along and struck out at an angle to the flow in a manner that would take him to the eastern shore but without draining all his limited strength. Tank rounds exploded on the sections of floating roadway where they connected to one another, or smashed into the pontoons that bore them. Any vehicles were engaged and able-bodied soldiers on the banks or upon the bridges were cut down without warning, but the only rounds landing near the men in the water were ricochet’s or just poorly aimed.