by Andy Farman
TP 32, MSR ‘NUT’ (Up), Autobahn’s 2 & 391, north of Brunswick, Germany: 24 miles south-west of the Vormundberg.
At TP 32, nine miles to the west of TP 33, the sound of cross-country tyres humming on the tarmac somewhere in the distance had L/Cpl Green, 352 Provost Company RMP, looking westwards before checking his watch. Their own ‘rover’ had only left on route maintenance a half hour before, but maybe they had found the problem quickly. Nevertheless he took the big flat bottomed Bardic lamp and turned a dial at its top to select a red filter before setting it carefully on the ground where it both illuminated the caltrop spikes, and its glare would conceal him from clear view in his shell scrape.
In the covering trench set further back they were used to the eccentric antics of the loner, but they knew the story of how the Russians had killed his colleagues and left him for dead, so they made no comment about his habits and he went about his business undisturbed.
They far preferred it when Maggie was pointsman though, she was quick with the banter and far better looking.
“Here we go.” Captain Sandovar said speaking over his shoulder to the six men crammed together in the rear of the Landrover.
“We have just a little over five minutes now before our friends make their presence known. So deal with the sentries quickly and neutralize those bridge demolition charges, understood?”
The British military number plate from their short wheelbase FFR now adorned this vehicle. The signing trailer had been left behind amongst the burnt out cars and vans at the rest stop with the bodies of Maggie Hebden and Tony Myers beneath its tarpaulin.
The young man had shown courage in his refusal to divulge the password of the day, even after one ear had been removed and dangled before his eyes by Sergeant Viskova. Captain Sandovar had therefore played good guy to Viskova’s sadistic bad guy and explained that they were paratroopers merely attempting to regain their own lines. In return for the password they would remove his and the young ladies boots and leave them stranded. If he refused however, well his men had not been with a woman for quite some time and his colleague was a good looking girl… he had left the threat unspoken. Of course the young soldier had not been aware that Viskova had been rather over enthusiastic in his disarming of the fair young lady and she was already extremely dead.
“Thirty two.” he had said at last.
“Thirty two?” Sandovar had queried, looking into the British soldiers eyes.
There was anger but no hint of guile in the young man’s return stare and Sandovar had nodded confirmation to Sergeant Viskova who had immediately cut his throat.
One Landrover pretty much looks like another and this one slowed before it entered the chicane, switching its dipped lights off so as not to illuminate or dazzle. They were all on the same side, were they not?
However, having stopped there was no sign of a traffic pointsman anywhere.
Sandovar opened his door and stepped out into the rain, using a hand to shield against the glare of the lamp as he looked about.
“Halt!” a voice said from somewhere beyond the lamp.
Sandovar squinted against the light. He could hear the Landrover’s chassis creak as his men slowly lowered themselves over the tailgate and extended the telescopic body of a 66mm LAW as quietly as they could. He quickly spoke with a raised and authoritative voice to cover the noise, and to act as a distraction of course.
“Captain Brown, 101 Provost Company, where the hell are you?” and took a step forwards.
“I said ‘Halt’…sir.”
The challenger was not apparently intimidated by testy senior officers.
“Thirty?” the voice said at last.
“Two.” Sandovar answered and took another step.
“I didn’t tell you that you could move, did I sir?”
Sandovar heard the unmistakable sound of a safety catch being released.
In the covering trench the soldiers from 1 Wessex grinned at the officer’s discomfort. More than once this military policeman had caught hell from officers like this, but having been shot once by someone in an officer’s uniform he clearly didn’t give a crap when they kicked off. It was good sport to watch.
“When you go out the gate at Chi, do you turn left or right for the Wellington Arms, and what side of the street is it?”
Captain Sandovar almost stammered a “What?” but that would have been a serious error. ‘Chi’ was slang for Chichester, the RMP training depot, wasn’t it?
He took a guess and trusted to bluff and bluster, allowing the handle of his fighting knife to slip out of his sleeve and into the palm of his hand unseen.
“Turn right, it’s on the left….and now you and I are going to have a conference without coffee, young man!”
His men were all out of the vehicle now, poised and tense, the LAW was armed and the firer need only step from behind the Landrover to take out the trench.
Captain Sandovar, the stolen Landrover and his Spetznaz team disappeared in a hail of flame, fire, black smoke and ball bearings.
Staff Sergeant Vernon had been trying without success to reach the signing vehicle owing to the jamming that had begun a half hour before. The DEL connection was apparently broken. Only the field telephones were working. He now stumbled from the TP, gaped at the western traffic point for a second before shouting.
“STAND-TO!…STAND-TO!”
It was a fairly unnecessary order as the thunderclap of sound that reverberated across the sodden landscape had carried that message already.
Rudely awoken bodies were pulling on webbing and fighting order, grabbing personal weapons and running to their assigned stand-to positions.
S/Sgt Vernon sprinted along the hard shoulder to where Simon was just rising to his knees in the shell scrape, a claymores clicker in one hand.
“Where the fuck did you get that?” Vernon asked.
He did not get an answer, but he did get to see Simon smiling for the first time.
What was left of the Landrover, and that wasn’t much, was scattered across all the lanes of both carriageways. The twisted chassis and engine block sat on perforated, burning tyres several feet from where the vehicle had been stopped. The skinned carcass of what had once been a man was draped over the central crash barrier.
The 1 Wessex sentries were wide eyed and hyper, still shocked at what had occurred. A vehicle had turned up and an officer had given the correct answer when challenged but his pointsman had still blown him away, quite literally.
Over on the airfield they were standing-to also, but not with the same sense of urgency.
What had happened, why was there no air raid warning?
With all the noise of the helicopter traffic no one noticed what was appearing out of the forest at the north east corner until the Romanian T-90s gunned their engines and charged at the wire mesh perimeter fence.
Three enemy tanks, externally clad in blocks of explosive reactive armour which gave them the appearance of scaly skinned monsters were here, behind the front lines?
The left-most T-90 struck a bar mine, a severed drive wheel flew high in the air, sections of amputated track spun away but no sooner had it ground to a halt its main gun elevated slightly and began to track its prey.
The Autobahns 2
The Autobahns 3
The Autobahns 4
The crippled tank’s target was a slow moving CH-53 Sea Stallion with a full cargo net of underslung artillery ammunition. There had been no wave off broadcast from the tower, no warning from the ground, and although the large machine in its German army camouflage paint scheme was moving too quickly for an accurate shot with a standard main gun round, it was a sitting target for the 125mm, beam-riding 9M119M Refleks missile that the main gun fired in its direction.
Essentially an anti-tank missile that was fired like a shell, the Refleks flew down the beam of the tanks laser range finder to its target. Although it was unsuitable against fixed wing aircraft, it worked well against the slower rotary wing variety.
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The missile struck the German Sea Stallion’s engine housing and detonated against main transmission, causing the heavy lift machine to immediately depart from controlled flight. It dropped like a stone with no hope of auto-rotation, falling the hundred feet onto the previously wrecked runway, landing directly upon its cargo net. The metal main rotors still rotated at a blur until they truck the tarmac and shattered, sending jagged sections for hundreds of metres in all directions. The small cluster of a half dozen airmen and women at the mobile canteen were sliced in two by a six metre length of rotor blade.
The Sea Stallions fuel tanks ruptured and the volatile contents ignited explosively.
The general reaction was initially one of shock, with ground crew, loaders and even the thirty strong Bundeswehr defence platoon left gawping instead of reacting for several vital seconds.
The control towers panoramic windows shattered into a hundred thousand shards of glass shrapnel and the roof blew off as the T-90 fired a second time.
Only now did they collectively realise the danger they were in.
Ground personnel scattered, seeking cover from the other two tanks that ploughed through the perimeter fence and without pause raced towards the flight line, machine guns and main armament firing.
It was pandemonium, and panic increased further as the Sea Stallion’s cargo of 155mm artillery shells and bag charges began cooking-off in the flames.
The airfield’s Spanish air defence platoon reacted positively, and achieved a faint but workable infrared lock on the stationary T-90 with a truck mounted Mistral sited at the north west corner of the airfield. It was a brave attempt but a 2.95kg charge and tungsten ball bearings may down a thin skinned aircraft but they barely scratched the Soviet tank’s armour plating. Before the crew could launch a third missile the tank’s commander had located their firing point and destroyed the launcher, the vehicle and the crew with a main gun round.
Autobahn 2.
East of the by now besieged Mississippi National Guardsmen of 198th Armoured Regiment at TP33, unfriendly eyes watched the Italian reconnaissance troop rejoin the autobahn and race towards the cutting below them.
“Let them pass, they are only glorified off-road jeeps.”
The ambushers stayed in cover until the sound of the engines were fading.
Two kilometres east of them an unusual roadblock was in place on the westbound carriageway in the form of the 155mm howitzer gun line and ammunition train. The support vehicles had all moved off the autobahn but were close by in a temporary harbour area, beneath the flyover outside the village of Uhry.
Lt Col Rapagnetta swapped vehicles and the remainder of the task force split into platoon packets with tactical spacing between each and continued on their way.
First infantry platoon of the 5th Cavalry floored the accelerators on their young commanders orders in an attempt to catch the recce troop and they quickly drew ahead of the main body, entering the tree lined cutting at 65mph where disc shaped MON-100 directional mines attached to the trees detonated.
As a dedicated anti-personnel mine the occupants with the Pumas were safe from the shrapnel, but not so the tyres or the vehicle commanders.
All four of the APCs were hit; clods of rubber from shredded tyres bounced away as steel wheel rims raised showers of sparks. The second Puma in the packet struck the central crash barrier and flipped onto its roof where it was t-boned by the third vehicle.
Second platoon came into view moments later and having braked hard and avoided entering the ambush site it lost the platoon commanders vehicle in a catastrophic explosion. The three survivors reversed at speed and avoided falling victim to Sagger missiles such had taken out their platoon headquarters.
With the first platoon APCs crippled and immobile it was easy work to finish off the vehicles with RPG-29 rocket grenades and cut down the survivors with small arms fire.
2km is no distance at all for most modern artillery but the time of flight was exceedingly long in relative terms. At maximum elevation the cutting was engaged by the PzH 2000 howitzers firing in burst mode, each gun firing three rounds in nine seconds, the first round was fused for air burst, the second for super-quick and the third for delay. As the rounds would fall vertically the ambushers would receive no warning.
Rock and earth were still falling as the task force approached the cutting again and an Ariete flattened a section of the central crash barrier to allow access to the eastbound lanes. One side of the cutting had collapsed, sliding onto the roadway. There was no living trace of the enemy who had been there.
TP 33, MSR ‘NUT’ (Up), Autobahn’s 2 & 39, east of Brunswick, Germany: 19 miles south-west of the Vormundberg.
The 11 tank fired but failed to kill its target despite a hit. It had already destroyed a BTR-70 from its current position and it now erred on the side of caution, changing position. The enemy’s explosive reactive panels were effective, and often as many as three rounds were required from the M1’s lighter 105mm main gun to secure a kill. The Javelins on the other hand had no trouble with single hit kills having been designed for that purpose. The missile had two shaped charges in tandem and even if the first’s energy was dissipated by striking an ERA panel, the second charge took care of business.
A TOW missile left the ITV’s dual launcher in an upward arc, its operator expertly bringing it down to strike the top of the T-72’s turret that the 11 tank had targeted. The thinner armour was no challenge for the warhead and the turret parted company with the chassis.
The ITV’s commander looked for more targets, peering through his periscope he swung it to the right, recognizing a clutch of waving antennae’s as they passed through his vision so he swung back, lowered his angle of view and stared directly down a T-90’s barrel.
Franklin heard the ITV blow up, the seven remaining missiles in its storage racks blew also, adding to the destruction with their sympathetic detonation. A fireball rose above the fighting position it had occupied, and the twisted aluminium hull began to burn.
The tanks and AFVs had appeared a few minutes after the infantry attack in the north had begun, with fewer tanks in number than the southern group, they were nevertheless dividing his fighting power.
13 fired to the south and missed, it reversed but received yet another hammer blow. The Soviet sabot screamed away into the night, a fast moving dot of light until it passed from view. The 13 tank had been struck twice now and survived, the crew should have been feeling lucky but no one was in a betting mood.
With the loss of the ITV and the 12 tank the company was reduced to 11, 13 and half a dozen Javelins for killing tanks. Pretty soon the enemy commander was going to figure out that the Americans were now covering three sides with only two M1s and a bunch of dismounts.
The force to the north was a mechanized company with a tank platoon in support. It was closing, moving in bounds across a wide front that prevented the defenders from concentrating their limited firepower.
Over to the south, five tanks and four BTR-70s had managed to work around until they had the eastern corner of the National Guard position flanked.
Had this been a table top exercise Franklin would have admired the coordination between the enemy tanks and Sagger teams. While one engaged his positions the other moved.
Franklin had no effective way of coordinating his own unit’s fire as that damn music was still foxing the airwaves.
11’s turret was moving, its main gun tracking a target visible to its thermal sights but not to Lt Franklin Stiles naked eyes. It fired, and a T-90 that had just popped out from behind a clump of trees to the west exploded. Franklin punched the air triumphantly as the M1 pulled back to change position. If they could just keep sniping in this fashion they could yet win the battle. A Sagger streaked in from the south and struck the Abrams raised rump as it reversed out of the hull down position. A flash of flame and the tank was concealed from view by black smoke. When the smoke cleared the tank was hung there at the top of the fighting positions ramp, s
moke issuing from its wrecked engine pack through the small molten hole in its armour and the engine compartments air vents. The crew had not bailed out though, and with a squeal of sprockets the machine rolled forwards, back into the position it had just left. It was now a stationary hardpoint, or a static target depending on which way you looked at it. Its machine guns opened fire, attempting to drive off a platoon of approaching infantry who were using the ground with skill.
The second platoon squad at the eastern corner cut loose with their M-240 and M16s before scattering in the face of an approaching tank.
A pair of heavy machineguns tore in the earth about the northern squad’s holes, the fire was coming from two more MBTs, a T-72 and a T-90 that were just a hundred metres out and closing fast. The fire was pinning the squad, preventing them from rising up and engaging them with their last Javelin. The enemy tanks task was made all the easier as the holes were illuminated by the flames from the burning ITV, as was the 13 tanks rear. The M1 was oblivious of its peril, engaging a target to the south and unaware it would in moments be in the sights of three main tank guns.
Franklin found himself frozen in place, like an unwitting spectator watching a car wreck about to happen. Which of the enemy tanks would destroy the company’s last serviceable M1?
The tank entering the defensive position from the east fired first, and the northern T-90 shuddered to a halt and caught fire. The T-72’s turret rounded on the newcomer even as that MBT’s gun came to bear. The T-72 fired before it could reload and it seemed to stagger but the round failed to penetrate and its own main gun stayed fixedly tracking. Now only fifty metres from the T-72 it fired, its round targeted on the turret ring. At that range it could not miss and the T-72 was struck at its most vulnerable spot, exploding in spectacular fashion.