THE TEN THOUSAND

by Harold Coyle

  From across the open expanse to his front, Dixon could see a tank move out of the tree line three thousand meters north of his position and head straight down the hard-surfaced road for the farm even before the green and white star clusters Major Harold Cerro fired in return went off. Though he couldn't see it, he had no doubt that Big Al's personnel carrier was following close behind the tank. For a moment, Dixon wondered if the tank was his own tank carrying Vorishnov out to greet him. That would be a bit foolish. He already felt a little uncomfortable at allowing Big Al to come out like that before the area was secure. Senior commanders, after all, just didn't do things like that. Not even brigade commanders. But in this case he could understand why Malin was doing this. For even if, after all was said and done, Big Al was allowed to retire gracefully, this would be the last time he would ever ride into battle in the service of his country.

  Ready, Dixon took one more look around to make sure that everything and everyone at his end were set. Captain Kozak and her small company were just about in place. She had her one remaining tank deployed to the left of the road, while the two infantry squads of her one infantry platoon were deployed in the woods to the right. Kozak's Bradley sat on the right side of the road keeping a watch to the northeast while Cerro sat on the left side of the road watching the farm and road itself from his Bradley. Satisfied that all was ready, Dixon ordered his driver to move out and head for the farmhouse.

  Just as the Leopard tank to Seydlitz's front was about to break out of the tree line, the tank commander of that tank stiffened upright in the open hatch. He stood there for only a second before he disappeared into the turret of the tank with such speed that it looked as if someone inside had pulled him down. Immediately after that the turret of the lead tank made a quick, short jerk to the right, or northwest. For a moment it stopped and then slowly began to move back to the left, as if it were tracking something moving south. Seydlitz, guessing what was going on, was about to call to that tank commander when he heard the tank commander report in. There was great excitement in his voice as the tank commander of the lead tank reported that he was about to engage an American tank moving south along the road.

  Not sure that he wanted to initiate such an engagement before he had deployed at least some of the company out of the column formation, Seydlitz was about to order the lead tank commander to hold his fire when that tank fired its main gun, shattering the cold winter air with a sharp crack.

  Ordering the commander of his personnel carrier to pull over to one side of the road, Malin stood up as high as he dared and leaned over the side in an effort to see around the damned tank that Vorishnov had insisted come along. Suddenly, without any warning, the tank to his front was engulfed in a huge shower of sparks, flame, and black smoke. The terrible screeching noise of metal tearing metal cut through Malin like a knife. Even before he had time to twist his head the fraction of an inch necessary to look from Dixon's personnel carrier to the tank less than fifty meters to their front, the first of the tank's large metal blow-off panels that covered the ammo storage area had already been torn free. Like a dead leaf, the blow-off panel was flipped off the turret and sent flying straight up, followed by a solid sheet of flame. Allowing himself to fall back into the personnel carrier, Malin continued to rotate his head to the left in the direction from which he thought the attack had come.

  When he finally was facing the east tree line, Malin saw the sinister form of a Leopard II tank, its main gun still smoking as it emerged from a clump of trees. They were, he realized, in trouble.

  His personnel carrier, moving as fast as it could roll, was about to reach the tank leading Malin's personnel carrier when out of the corner of his eye Dixon saw a flash. Instinctively his head cut over in that direction, but then, when the tank on the road to their front began to tear itself apart, he twisted his head back in that direction. Not needing long to assess what was happening, Dixon jumped up, hit the sergeant that was serving as the commander of his personnel carrier on the left shoulder, and yelled, "Get behind the burning tank. Go left and get behind the burning tank on the left. Ambush from the woods."

  The sergeant, having seen the same thing, was already preparing to do that, since he knew that it would have taken longer to turn around and run back to the woods they had just left. The driver, on the other hand, who had been shocked by what had just happened, immediately let his foot off the accelerator. The sergeant commanding the vehicle heard the engine change pitch and yelled, while Dixon was yelling to him, "NO! DON'T STOP! DON'T STOP. GO! GO!"

  When he heard both the sergeant and Dixon, the driver quickly overcame his initial panic and stomped his foot down till it couldn't go down anymore. With a sudden jerk, Dixon's personnel carrier lurched forward and went screaming toward the burning tank, still being racked by secondary explosions, and the farmhouse.

  Unable to get the commander of the tank in front of him to acknowledge his calls, Seydlitz watched helplessly as that tank commander allowed his tank to continue to roll west, out of the tree line and into the open. Though Seydlitz still couldn't see around the lead tank, it was obvious that he was preparing to engage another target. Seydlitz watched the turret of the lead tank jerk to the right a little and then as before begin to drift back slowly to the left. Not waiting any longer, Seydlitz ordered his own driver to move off the trail to the left and then instructed his company to commence deploying.

  From where she sat, Kozak had only seen a faint muzzle blast from the tank to the northeast that had fired. At that moment it was still too far in the woods and masked by trees. Still, as she had on many occasions before, she dropped into her seat, issuing her initial fire command to Sergeant Wolf, her gunner, as she did so. "GUNNER! MISSILE! TANK!"

  Wolf, who had not seen the telltale muzzle blast, yelled back, "Cannot identify!"

  Once she was settled in her seat and had her eye pressed against her sight, Kozak grabbed the control handles and slewed the turret to the right until the sight was sitting at the edge of the tree line to the northeast some two thousand meters away. Believing his commander had made a mistake, Wolf yelled again, "Cannot identify!"

  Kozak was animated. "The tree line, Wolf. The enemy tank is still in the tree line. Keep your eyes open and be ready to pop him when he sticks his nose out."

  Leaning as far into his sight as he could, Wolf watched and waited. Then he saw it. At a range of two thousand meters, the 120mm gun tube of the Leopard tank, even in the Bradley's high-powered sight, looked like a thin pencil line. Still Wolf was able to see it, yelling when he did. "Okay! I got 'im! Here he comes." Depressing the palm switches on the turret controls, Wolf tried to traverse the turret but saw that it didn't move. Immediately, without taking his eye from the sight, he yelled out, "I see the enemy tank, Captain. Let go of your controls!"

  In her excitement, Kozak had forgotten that she was still hanging on to her matching set of turret controls. As with a tank, the commander's controls override the gunner's, denying the gunner the ability to traverse the turret or elevate the gun until the commander releases the palm switch on his control. When Wolf yelled, Kozak let go of the turret control as if she had been shocked by an electric current. That, she thought, had been dumb. Really dumb.

  With the turret under his control, Wolf watched the gun tube. As soon as the German tank began to appear, Wolf started to track it. He was about to announce the launching of his first TOW missile when, to his surprise and Kozak's, the German tank jerked suddenly, was bathed in a shower of sparks, and then began to spew black smoke.

  Leaping up on her seat and sticking her head back up out of the turret, Kozak realized that an American tank in the tree line due north of their position had also been tracking the German tank and been able to get its shot off first. As she peered across the field, a sudden feeling of disappointment swept over her because they had missed a shot, though she didn't stop to think that in truth they had never had a clear shot. That feeling was quickly pushed aside when she heard Cerro calling
her on the auxiliary radio receiver. Reaching down, Kozak flipped the remote radio frequency selection lever, taking her off her company command net and over to the battalion command net.

  Waiting a second for the radio to reset, Kozak was about to respond to Cerro when the distinctive boom and screech of a TOW missile launch to her right caught her attention. Glancing over in that direction, she didn't see any indication that the 1st Platoon Bradley next to her had fired. It had to have been the other 1st Platoon Bradley. Looking out across the field, back to the northeast at the woods where the German tank had come from, she saw no sign of another enemy tank or a TOW missile headed that way. Something, she realized, was coming up on their flank through the woods. Anxious to reset her radio to the company net and find out what was going on, Kozak blurted a quick report on the battalion net. "Hotel 60, this is Charlie 60. I think we're in contact over on our right flank, in the woods. I'll report back in a minute. Out."

  Without waiting for any sort of acknowledgment, Kozak flipped her frequency selection lever back to the company net and began calling her 1st Platoon.

  Sitting next to the road, Cerro, perched atop his Bradley, felt overwhelmed. In quick succession he had watched the M-1 tank coming south toward him blow up, leaving his brigade and corps commanders on the road and exposed. Then he had watched a German tank come trundling out of the woods to the northeast while he was talking on the radio and had done nothing. Finally, just as things seemed to be getting under control, the commander of the company he was with called in, told him she thought they were in contact with enemy forces due east of their position, and then disappeared off the battalion radio net. Though he could clearly see Kozak's Bradley to his right, less than thirty meters away, it could have been a million miles away for all the attention she was paying him. Determined to solve one of his problems, he ordered his driver to back up and then move over to where Kozak's Bradley was sitting. If they couldn't talk on the radio, they could at least shout at each other.

  Inching his way out to the edge of the tree line, Seydlitz, hunched low in his open hatch, scanned the open field to the south and west for any sign of danger. His gunner, able to see the hard-surfaced road to the west for the first time, saw an American personnel carrier racing north on that road toward the burning American tank and yelled out his acquisition report. "Achtung! Personnel carrier!"

  Seydlitz, who was looking for more dangerous targets, ignored the gunner's sighting. His vigilance was rewarded when off to their left he caught sight of a Bradley in the wood line to the southwest backing up. Now he was ready to issue his fire command. "Achtung! Bradley, traverse left!" The gunner, aware of what was happening, complied until in the center of his primary sight he caught a glimpse of the retreating Bradley. Seydlitz, who had allowed the driver to advance a little further out to the edge of the tree line, finally ordered him to halt and prepare to engage the Bradley.

  Unable to see anything from where his tank was, Second Lieutenant Ellerbee ordered his driver to move forward slowly. As they did so, Ellerbee ordered his gunner to keep his eyes open for the clump of trees across the field that would appear to their right once they had cleared the trees they had been hiding behind. With his head up out of his open hatch, Ellerbee looked first to his right at the trees to the southeast and then south down the hard-surfaced road where he watched Colonel Dixon's personnel carrier pull up next to another one behind the burning tank. They were using the destroyed tank as cover. He was thinking about how clever this was when his gunner screamed, "ENEMY TANK! TWELVE O'CLOCK IN THE WOOD LINE!"

  Without even looking, Ellerbee dropped back into the turret, ordering the driver to stop and issuing a fire command as he went. As the gunner and loader yelled their responses, Ellerbee gave the command to fire before he even got his eye to his primary sight extension. Used to the rock and recoil of the powerful 120mm main gun by now, Ellerbee eased his eye up to the commander's extension just as the tank was settling back down from firing its first round. Though he could see from the fading whiffs of smoke that they had hit the Leopard tank, he knew they hadn't killed it, for its 120mm main gun, exactly the same type that was mounted on Ellerbee's tank, was now being trained on them.

  At first neither Seydlitz nor his gunner realized that they had been hit. A sudden shudder and a soft scream from the driver's compartment, more of an excited exclamation, were the first clues that something was wrong. Only when Seydlitz noticed his tank jerk to the right did he call out, "Willie, what are you doing?"

  "Captain, we've been hit. Right track I—"

  The gunner's scream cut him off. "ACHTUNG! PANZER!"

  Looking back up to his sight, Seydlitz saw the American tank that had just fired on them as it appeared in the far right corner of their sight for the first time. "Forget the Bradley, engage the tank, now!"

  Laying his sight on the center mass of the target, the gunner announced he was ready. Knowing that the American would continue to shoot till he saw his tank burn, Seydlitz didn't hesitate. "FIRE!"

  They had hit it. Ellerbee knew they had hit the damned thing. But it wasn't dead. Without another thought, he yelled his new command as he watched the German's gun come to bear. "TARGET! RE-ENGAGE!"

  Without waiting for the loader to finish announcing "UP!" Ellerbee's gunner screamed, "ON THE WAY!"

  In quick succession, as if one finger had pulled the two triggers, both the Leopard and the M-1 fired. And with the skill and precision of veteran gunners aided by high technology, both gunners hit their marks. It was Ellerbee's tank, however, that got the worst of the exchange. Punching its way through the frontal armored plate on the left side of the turret, the armor-piercing round fired by Seydlitz's gunner scattered hot scraps of metal and debris as it continued through the crew compartment and into the ammo storage racks to the rear of the turret. There it ignited the propellant and the warheads of several rounds, beginning the process of destroying Ellerbee's tank.

  The scream of the loader, the sudden discharge of the onboard fire extinguishers, and a searing pain that shot through Ellerbee's body told him he needed to get out now. There was no real conscious thought. He didn't feel the pain or comprehend everything that happened in the few seconds it took him to pull himself up out of the turret and onto the turret roof. Nothing registered. No pain, no thoughts. -Not even when he rolled off the turret, hit the right front fender, and bounced off it like a rag doll and onto the ground did he understand what he was doing. Only vaguely was he aware of his gunner and driver, who both came down next to him, grabbing him by either arm and dragging him back into the woods as his tank, the last of four tanks in his platoon, tore itself apart.

  Shaken, but alive, Seydlitz looked about the turret of his tank, first at the loader, then the gunner. "What happened? What in the hell happened? Did we get him?"

  The gunner, anxious to see, put his eye to his sight, then cursed. "SHIT! He got our sight."

  Putting his own eye up to his sight, Seydlitz saw that the primary sight was gone. "The telescope. Is it still good?"

  From above, Seydlitz watched the gunner pull his head away from the eyepiece of his shattered primary sight and move over to the telescope mounted on the side of the main gun's cradle. "Yes. Yes, it's still good. And the American tank, it's burning!"

  Popping his head up, Seydlitz looked across the field and saw that their shot had been true. Though he couldn't see Ellerbee and his crew as they fled back into the woods, that didn't matter. Looking back to the left, where he had last seen the American Bradley, Seydlitz confirmed that it was now gone. With no primary sight, one track shot out, and no targets in view, he decided that he needed to check in and find out what was happening to his left and right and then report to battalion.

  From his vantage point, Vorishnov had no idea who was coming out on top. He could see that both Dixon and Malin were for the moment safe to the right of the burning hulk of the tank that had been Malin's escort. To the southeast, in the woods that the Germans had come out of, there was
at least one German tank destroyed and a second one that had been hit. Due south, where Dixon's force had been, he could see dense clouds of dirty black smoke rising on what should have been the right flank for those forces and another column of dense black smoke to the left of that. While Vorishnov didn't quite understand exactly what was going on, he realized that the enemy attack had two prongs, only one of which, the one coming from the woods to the southeast, that he could do anything about. Contacting the commander of the battalion he was with, Vorishnov ordered him to deploy more forces to their left and prepare to send infantry over into the woods where the first German tank had come from. In the meantime, he ordered his fire support officer back at the brigade main command post to call for every piece of artillery he could find and begin to pound the woods to the southeast.

  When Dixon and Malin finally realized they were safe, Dixon pulled himself out of the rear of his personnel carrier and stood on its roof. Carefully he looked up and over the burning tank that was giving them cover. From below, Malin, who was just now catching his breath, called up, "Can you see what's going on, Scotty?"

  Just as Malin asked that question, Dixon saw a muzzle flash from the German woods to the east. A flash of tracer streaking from those woods came to an abrupt halt in the tree line not far from where Malin had come from. A sudden bright flash, followed by a sheet of flames, told Dixon that another American tank had been hit. His reaction told Malin that something bad had happened. Finally ready, Big Al pulled himself up and jumped over onto Dixon's personnel carrier. Together they stood there side by side powerless to do anything effective to influence the battle as they watched the next series of exchanges.