by Andy Farman
From what he knew of NATO doctrine, the enemy troops would be hampered by chemical warfare clothing, unlike his own troops. The stocks of chemical warfare shells were limited, many had been destroyed in the post Warsaw Pact period.
Of all the varied types of chemical agents, they all fall into two categories, which can be selected by the commander on the ground. ‘Persistent’, which linger and deny use of territory to an enemy, and ‘Non-persistent’, this last type dissipates rapidly but inflicts casualties initially and causes the enemy to suit up, restricting their efficiency. This was the category they had used in the opening barrage and he doubted that the British had unmasked since then, quite frankly he didn’t blame them.
The lack of counter-battery fire worried him too, no doubt NATO had supply problems and limited stocks since the wall had come down, but he thought that they should have made some effort. The same went for their air forces, apart from their attack helicopters; he had seen nothing, no attempt at air superiority or reconnaissance. He had mentioned this to the divisional commander and been told not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
One by one, his companies and attached units reported in that they were on the start lines and he picked up his handset whilst watching the luminous second hand of his watch.
“All stations…go, go, go!”
It took some bottle to drive into the heavier barrage around the forward fighting positions and Major Darcy’s worry was that they would not be able to get hull-down again because of fallen trees across the revetment.
That however was not the problem, but a large tree had fallen at the far end and would prevent them depressing the 120mm main tank gun fully.
Although he would have been prepared to leave the tank to shift obstacles himself, he was not going to call up Engineers to risk themselves in blasting the thing for him. They could not attach tow cables and drag it clear without exposing themselves totally, to enemy fire.
“Corporal Varney, have we got Sabot loaded?” he asked his loader.
“Yes boss, why?”
“There is a damn great tree blocking the far end of the firing position.” He gave it a second or two of thought. “Driver, reverse…” to the loader he said.
“Load HE, let’s try and shift it.”
The Challenger II has three types of armament, a 7.62mm pintle mounted machine-gun is the smallest. To the left of the main armament is an American, Boeing 7.62mm Chain Gun and the main armament is the British Aerospace L30, 120mm rifled Charm 1, gun. Space for ammunition is always a limiting factor for a tank. Britain had foregone the inclusion of smoke rounds years before and also the conventional ‘cannon shell’ with its propellant encased in metal, usually brass. ‘Bag charges’, propellant contained in fabric, allowed more economic expenditure inasmuch as a single bag would be sufficient in propelling the round in shorter range engagements. It allowed the tank to carry 50 main gun rounds as opposed the US M1 Abrahms 36 if it carried only HESH, high explosive squash head and conventional APFSDS, armour piercing, fin stabilised, discarding sabot rounds which struck the target with a heavy tungsten dart rather than an explosive warhead. Today they carried only 45 rounds, as their load included the expensive DU rounds with its higher length to diameter aspect ratio and metal propellant case, at 36” long it took up a lot of space.
As ordered, Stott removed the tungsten sabot round and replaced it with a HESH round which although referred to as ‘HE’ by the tankies, tank crews, was an anti-armour round. Its explosive charge was smaller than that of artillery HE rounds, as it was in the form of a shaped charge, however it would have to do for now.
“Anyone remember if there are any of our positions nearby?” Darcy asked.
Darcy did not want to injure or add to his own sides danger, they had all visited the fighting positions on foot, for ease of recognition once the muck started flying, but none of the crew ever imagined that it would resemble the present moonscape.
He received negative replies, no one could tell and he could recognise little himself through the viewing blocks.
“HE loaded!” Corporal Stott called out.
Darcy peered ahead, judging for safe distance. Here goes, he told himself as the barrel depressed.
The 22nd (Czech) Motor Rifle Regiment had advanced in good order toward the river below the wooded hill to the north of the town of Lohmen. His right edge of the advance ran along the highway, a forest was the other side of that. Colonel Eskiva, was no farmer, he had no idea what crops were being crushed beneath the tracks and wheels of his regiment. Hedgerows, many hundreds of years old were being destroyed, splintered and crushed as the AFVs advanced. Eskiva was stood upright in his turret, as were all the vehicle commanders in the absence of fire from the British positions. His tanks had communications far inferior to that of NATOs but the reason for using flags as a form of signalling at this moment was security.
NATO had secure encrypted messaging systems, a high-tech email for its passing orders and short-range encrypted radio communications for performing manoeuvres such as this, denying an enemy any electronic warning of their coming. The moon was out tonight, and the flashes from detonating munitions on the wooded slopes ahead looked surreal.
Two loud explosions sounded above the noise of their own artillery’s bombardment and then were joined by secondary explosions as a BTR-80s 30mm and 7.62mm ammunition cooked off. Bringing his scope up he saw a T-72 missing a road wheel and its right track, a full two hundred metres away the APC was self-destructing as its 30mm cannon ammunition exploded in the inferno that had engulfed it, and its occupants.
Eskiva looked down to check his map, this was supposed to be a clear route forward; the mine fields marked by their recce troops were being skirted. He looked up and cursed as more mines went off as his vehicles crossed over them. There was a tearing sound overhead which caused him to look to look up, recognising the sound of many projectiles, travelling east instead of west.
“What the hell else can go wrong?” he said to himself.
In their hide beneath the railway line, Big Stef had been on the gun when the Czech armour had appeared in the distance. Isolated as they were from the rest of the battalion, masking up with the onset of the enemy barrage had increased their sense of vulnerability; they had only each other to rely on, truly on their own. Both snipers had been feeling the effects of nerves since the morning when the Yeomanry and their own recce platoon had returned to friendly lines. They knew how many friendlies were roaming out toward the enemy, the number of vehicles and the troops in them. It had been sobering to watch them return, damaged, without their full complement or with obvious wounded aboard. Some had returned on foot, usually singly or in pairs, but the numbers had been less than had sallied forth several days before. Right until the point that the enemy AFVs had appeared out of the distance, Freddie and Big Stef had hoped to see stragglers whom they knew, but they were disappointed.
They broke radio silence for the first time in three days to give the heads up. Freddie had their Swiftscope spotting telescope to his eye while he sent the contact report. Big Steph had gripped the L96A1 firmly as he used the Schmidt and Bender 6 x 42 telescopic sight to assist in accurately assessing the size of the opposition. Had it been darker he would have replaced the sight with a nightscope, but the magnification was sufficient for their purposes right now. For the past several hours’ the ground had vibrated with the shells and rockets that hammered the positions behind them but that was forgotten now as they watched the enemy vanguard draw near.
With the contact report sent the snipers prepared to get noisy and Freddie was spotting for decent targets, i.e. officers.
“Tenth from the left, front rank, antennae tank with a twat waving flags about…must be the company commander, he’s got more antennas than all the rest in that rank,” his voice muffled by the respirator he wore. Big Stef swung the muzzle to the left.
“Got it.” He committed the target to memory and moved on to the next one that Freddie identified.
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When the lead company drove straight into the minefield to their front, they gave muted cheers.
“Hellooo…what have we here…Stef, one-o’clock, six-hundred metres, right at the back…could be a big boss, command tank mate!”
Stephanski could not pick it out at first, not until a man in a turret very helpfully picked up a map.
Taking up the first pressure he murmured,
“And you sunshine…can say goodnight…forever.” In the confined space of the hide, the report was like a thunderclap.
In the last company of the regiment, its company commanders torso jerked spastically before sliding down out of sight into the turret through the open hatch. A blood splattered map fluttered away behind the tank and Colonel Eskiva, 75m behind it realised the danger.
“All stations, beware snipers, beware snipers!” he radioed to all his tank commanders before lowering himself down until only his head protruded, stuffing his own map inside his coveralls.
Switching frequencies he reported the current situation to division, giving the approximate location of the minefield but ended the transmission with a mere
“Proceeding,” before changing back to his regimental command net.
All but four of the leading company’s tanks and APCs had struck mines. He may have told division he was proceeding as planned but he had no intention of doing so. To have asked permission to change the axis of advance would have been fruitless, so he got on the regimental net and gave his orders, despite the very real possibility that someone back at division was monitoring this net, he had no choice.
The plough tanks had kept pace with the regiment, to the rear of the command element and they now accelerated, angling left to where his map showed a minefield to be. He already knew that there was a thick field directly ahead where none was supposed to be. Perhaps the British had deceived the recon elements of his army, perhaps not. The orders he gave stopped the regiments advance and turned them left where they would reform into columns behind the tanks with the mine ploughs. The British could not have mined the entire area, indeed they were not supposed to have any mines. Either way, the mobile troops who had harassed them on the way here had to have some means of returning to their lines through safe lanes.
Fifteen miles west of Wunschendorf, lay the field headquarters of the composite NATO division facing this Red Army thrust into Germany.
NATOs forces today bore little resemblance to that of the armies that had faced the Warsaw Pact until the nineties. Not the least of their problems was that of language, with English, French, and German being used, but the commander was a French-Canadian with a German wife, which eased the problem somewhat. Dialect and accent were another matter, when the commander found himself speaking to a native of Newcastle, Belfast or Glasgow. On the occasions that he spoke with some signallers from 3 (UK) Mechanised Brigade, he would interrupt them in mid-unintelligible babble, reverting to Quebecois.
“Se fermer la trappe,” and pass the handset to a Brit with a Gallic shrug. He knew that he was speaking English, he just didn’t know what language the men and women on the other end thought that they were speaking!
The staff had been plotting the location of the enemy’s artillery gun-lines and vehicle concentrations. Due to the high angle of flight of the enemy mortars, two different mobile radars were required to locate mortar, rocket and tube artillery lines. Cymbeline, mortar-locating radar, had detected the flight path of the mortar bombs, and taking two their trajectory’s it plotted the Grid Reference of the enemy base plates.
Phoenix Unmanned Air Vehicle’s (UAVs), small, stealthed aircraft roamed beyond friendly lines. The real time surveillance and target acquisition systems of the surveillance suite’s sent back information via datalink to the ground station that, in turn, transmitted the intelligence gathered directly to artillery command posts. The Phoenix’s Kevlar, glass fibre, carbon reinforced plastics and Nomex honeycomb construction, was kept aloft by 25hp, two stroke flat twin engines. The design made it hard to see with the naked eye, IR, radar or detect it by sound.
The headquarters also received Elint from its teams of mobile troops equipped with MSTAR, a lightweight Pulse Doppler J – Band, all weather radar. Being ground-based, it reached out only 20km but freed up the airborne JSTARS to concentrate beyond that range. MSTAR had the job of detecting helicopters, vehicles, infantry and assisted the artillery observer in detecting the fall of their own shot. The MSTAR electro-luminescent display, shows dead ground relief and targets track history, it also has the ability to superimpose a map grid at 1:50,000 scale, to ease transfer to military maps. All this information had told NATO that the enemy artillery was being very dumb, gambling with its own safety and security in order to deliver a heavier barrage. For the first hour and a half the Red Army guns had relocated after each shoot but since then had remained in place, pounding NATO lines. NATO had several reasons for not using its guns from the outset and fairly low ammunition stocks were one reason. The other was to preserve their guns for the armoured assault against them, first hammering the enemy artillery before dividing the guns to go for headquarters and logistics targets on one hand, and fire support for its troops on the other.
The divisional commander judged that the time was now, time to unleash his gunners and ground-attack aircraft on an enemy grown complacent.
At about the time Colonel Eskiva’s Motor Rifle Regiments lead Company hit the minefield, the NATO guns and MLRS let fly at their counterparts in a TOT shoot, timed over target, so the different calibre shells fired from differing ranges, all arrived at the same moment.
“You missed the bastard, Stef!” The Guardsman looked briefly across at his spotter.
“Maybe I didn’t hit the geezer you were looking at, but I got an officer in an antennae tank.”
Ahead of them the assault ceased its movement directly toward them and turned south, leaving Stef to pick his own targets whilst Freddie reported the change to the battalion CP.
Most of the commanders in the tanks that sported clusters of antennas, marking them as commanders of company’s and above, were now only exposing their heads. It is far easier to see what their commands were doing with the naked eye rather than through viewing blocks. Stef aimed at his next target, allowing for the vehicle speed and aiming slightly ahead. The Czech officer in the tank kept rising up to look around at his vehicles and Stef suddenly noticed that he wore no respirator or chemical protective clothing. He panned the weapon around, none of the enemy in sight was wearing NBC, and the only logical explanation was that they knew the chemicals would have dissipated, they had to have been non-persistent category weapons. Swinging back to the antennae tank he controlled the flow of his breathing, taking in oxygen as he aimed, letting a breath out as he took up the first pressure on the trigger and squeezed at the bottom of the breathing cycle, following through to watch the fall of shot. The company commanders head disappeared in a red mist and Stef shouted to Freddie that the enemy was unmasked and not wearing NBC clothing either. Freddie got back on the radio and Stef paused to listen beyond the walls of their hide, the enemy shelling had ceased.
The cessation of the enemy barrage allowed the British infantry to sort themselves out and in the midst of this came the order to carry out local tests and unmasking drills. CAM L1A1, a hand held monitor was the first step in testing for CW agents that may still be present. It would respond to vapour agents as it searched for nerve, blister, blood and choking agents, its micro-processor flashing up the results on its LCD display. However, there was always the chance that not all the machines were working as advertised so human guinea pigs carried out the second stage.
Across the battalion area, pairs of men were chosen to carry out the drills, take off their respirators and breathe the air of the battlefield, it was at times like these that you find out who your friends are.
Moving out from cover and kneeling, facing each other, those who had drawn the short straw or pissed someone off recently began the business of deco
ntaminating clothing and equipment before the unlucky half unmasked.
Fullers Earth in squeeze bottles and impregnated in bang pads were used with vigour before the mask was removed. The guinea pig had closed his eyes first before letting the outside world into the mask, just enough to take one breath before replacing it. His oppo watched closely for any signs of his mate being effected by chemical warfare agents that may still be present, ready to stab him with an Atropine pen which would combat the chemicals effects whilst also inducing mild belladonna poisoning. The drills progressed to the point where the subject was breathing normally the unfiltered night air and the order was passed to unmask everywhere.
East of the river, in the rear areas of the Red Army assault the NATO barrage arrived with devastating force as conventional shells airburst over, or impacted on the gun-lines and other high value targets. IM’s, improved munitions, broke apart to rain dual purpose improved conventional munitions, small bomblets, down on the target areas.
At the Czech Divisional HQ, the commander had been informed that his lead regiment was no longer advancing towards the enemy but had changed course without permission. He listened for himself on that regiments radio net before summoning the Field Police and ordering Colonel Eskiva’s arrest and summary execution.
Phoenix rather than Elint had located the divisional CP, as the headquarters had three ‘antennae farms’ well removed from the CP, should NATO attack the radiating source of the radio traffic. Elint located the antennae farms but it was the small, remote operated aircraft that carried the cameras and heat sensors which located the camouflaged command post. People walk and leave marks on the earth and turf, and they generate heat.