Before the war, the kill ratio on the NATO books was six to one — that is, six Soviet combatants had to be killed for every NATO combatant if NATO was to hold. Within four hours of the Fulda Gap, becoming the Fulda “Gash,” the ratio changed dramatically to ten to one, the armored spearheads of the Soviet divisions, a half million men in all, first crossing the Polish plain with a speed that surprised even General Marchenko. He had long held that the “fatal flaw” in NATO’s armor would be the West’s bourgeois reluctance to engage “other elements,” by which he meant the West’s reluctance to kill civilians. And he believed it would work in the Soviets’ favor.
He was right. The army of refugees fleeing west of Fulda, and indeed, all along the north-south axis that had been NATO’s central front, impeded NATO tank reinforcements. No matter how “hard-nosed,” as the Americans called it, NATO’s troops had been trained to be, most British, American, and particularly Dutch tank regiments found it unacceptable to fire point-blank into the human tide of refugees that clogged the roads. Some of the Allied tanks, seeing a blur of red, the treads of Russian T-90s mercilessly rushing and chopping through the screaming columns of refugees, did open fire. The belch of the M-1s and Leopards, their 120- and 105-millimeter guns sending white-hot, dartlike armor-piercing tungsten through the tightly packed refugees in efforts to stop the Russian T-90s, only added to the carnage. The air sleeve alone surrounding the armor-piercing needle, traveling and discarding its sabot, or shoe, at over forty-five hundred feet a second, was so hot that it alone seared people for distances up to two or three meters from the trajectory path. Even so, the molten discarding sabot rounds and the HESH — high-explosive squash heads — of molten metal that were deadly as tank killers, effective on both sloped as well as flat armor, were not the rounds that caused the major casualties among the refugees. This dubious honor was left to the high-explosive antipersonnel rounds which were favored by both sides, as much to destroy supporting infantry as the tanks that spearheaded them.
In the first twenty-four hours following the Soviet break-through to a megaphone-shaped two-hundred-square-mile area west of Fulda, there were over seventeen thousand civilian casualties, most of these women and children. In the raging cacophony of the battle, involving five thousand NATO and Soviet tanks, the inability of NATO Medevac choppers to get through the dust, smoke, and cross fire meant that many wounded civilians and combatants perished who would otherwise have survived had they been treated at MASH units within the first two critical hours of having been hit. This was particularly the case among the elderly, many of them disoriented — some gone mad from the sight and smells of bodies blown apart and from the ear-shattering screams of shellfire and the gut-punching sound of earth exploding all about them. Utterly confused in the tumult of the highly mobile battle, positions of friend and foe shifting rapidly from one moment to the next, and dazed by indiscriminate artillery and mortar fire, some of the elderly were separated from loved ones, and wandered about, dazed, blinded by dust and smoke, suffocating in gasoline-drenched air and then crunched beneath the advancing Soviet and defending NATO tanks.
The breaching of the gap by the Russian army divisions had come much faster than expected, not only because bad weather over the Polish plain hampered Allied air attacks, but because of a single piece of equipment, vastly underestimated by the Allies.
As reports came through to Allied HQ in Brussels, it quickly became evident that the T-90s, having been fitted with thermal imagers of a quality underestimated by NATO intelligence, had created havoc during nighttime battles. In addition to mixtures of expensive laser and Stad R stereo coincidence and optical range finders, neither of which was proving as good in actual battle conditions as in maneuvers, when the cost of real shells had precluded thorough testing, the Russian T-90s and T-80s had a thermal sight. Originally made under contract in South Korea, and later copied in East Germany, it proved remarkably resilient, whereas the other, more sophisticated, laser imagers used by NATO had run into unexpected trouble after the sustained shock of actual combat.
Although Maj. Kiril Marchenko had played only a relatively minor role in advocating the thermal sight, he nevertheless managed to take a lion’s share of the credit. And it was true that the purchase of the much less expensive thermal imagers did fit with his advocacy of the svyatye dvoyniki— “holy twins” of the Soviet High Command. The first tenet was that overwhelming numbers in the Soviet armies would have to make up for qualitative superiority in the West. And secondly, this meant you had to win quickly — before NATO could rally and/or resupply.
In turn, a quick war meant that not only must sabotage be ruthlessly stamped out in the republics, as General Brodsky in Tallinn had finally realized, but armored columns had to be trained to fight as well at night as in the daylight. Accordingly, at Marchenko’s urging — a very unpopular move at the time — T-90 and T-80 tank regiments had been trained on the vast Russian steppes first at night, then in daylight maneuvers. Indeed, the division of 270 tanks in which Marchenko’s son, Sergei, had fought before winning his transfer to the air force academy and his posting to the Far East station had itself trained first at night. And during these night maneuvers, commanders insisted on tanks maintaining the Soviets’ punishing twenty-five-meter margin between each tank, a much narrower one than that used by the German Leopards, American M-1s, or British Challengers, who disdained such distances for fear of attracting high-density antitank artillery fire.
One advantage the NATO tanks did possess was a gun depression of nine and ten degrees, twice that of the Russian tanks, so that whenever NATO armor was given the chance to withdraw to defensive, hunkered down defilade firing positions, they exacted a deadly price for any S-WP advance. Still, the sheer numbers of the Russian tanks that had poured through the Fulda Gap, a ratio of four to one, had overwhelmed and continued to overwhelm NATO. And this despite the carnage visited upon the massed Russian armor by the high-tail-engined American Thunderbolts. Once thousands of tanks were joined in close battle, often at ranges of less than a thousand yards, the deadly hail of the American Thunderbolts’ armor-piercing twenty-millimeter cannon fire was lost, for in the confusion of night battles particularly, where a T-90 and an M-l became indistinguishable on the pilot’s infrared, NATO’s air superiority in ground attack aircraft ceased to count.
Out of the melee a report, initially lost or simply disregarded in the avalanche of incoming signals, reached an Allied intelligence officer in Heidelberg. It would forever change the nature of war, and strike down the prejudice of renowned tank commanders like Gen. Douglas Freeman.
Recovered from his hospitalization and riding high on his Korean exploits, Freeman, over the objections of most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been ordered by the president to take over command of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Freeman, known to even the European troops as “George C. Scott” after his successful attack on what he called the “verminous pad of the runt”—Kim Il Sung’s Pyongyang — had stunned his officers during the Pyongyang raid by using women volunteer chopper pilots in the lead assault on the North Korean capital.
At a time when American-ROK morale was rock-bottom in Korea, Freeman had paradoxically reversed his previous stand against using women in combat roles. He had asked for women volunteers to pilot the lead choppers — and had got them. In one stroke he had ended debate in America about women in combat and shamed reluctant male conscripts to “volunteer.” Even so, a prejudice Freeman held close to his bosom and took to Europe was his belief that no matter how successful women might be as chopper pilots or superb ground crew, there was no place for them in a tank. The Dutch Forty-Second Mechanized regiment now trapped in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket had been the first to raise the matter. Freeman’s objection, in a confidential memo to the Pentagon, was now part of the growing Freeman legend.
“A tank battle,” he had written, “is no place for a woman. Forty sixty-pound rounds may have to be hand-fed into the main gun if automatic load malfunctions. I do not subscribe to the common theory that a woman aboard a tank will make the men softer — cause the men to be more concerned with protecting the weaker sex than with killing enemy tanks. Nor do I believe they are the weaker sex in terms of their ability to sustain high-level stress. On occasion I would argue they are superior in this regard. Nevertheless, a woman aboard a tank is unacceptable because it is a matter of hygiene. No one in the Pentagon seems to realize that in battle, a tank crew cannot make rest stops. For a tank to stop in the kind of sustained and highly mobile battles we have been engaged in to date would make the tank a stationary target, and as we have discovered with the Russian night sights, the enemy needs only a five-second fix on a stationary target to blow it to pieces. Besides which, the interior of the tank is a highly charged, fume-laden atmosphere in which the necessary body functions only add to an already unpleasant situation. In short, defecation and urination will in most cases have to be undertaken, as they have traditionally been, in helmets until the opportunity for jettisoning such material presents itself— which may not be for many hours. It is not only the severe discomfort and unpleasant atmosphere which I have in mind in strenuously arguing against women tank crews but rather a sensitivity to their need for privacy, which simply cannot be accommodated aboard an armored fighting vehicle.”
Col. Maureen Davis of the USMC replied that “General Freeman’s objections to women tank crews no doubt arise out of his sincere concern for hygiene and practicality. He need not be so concerned. No doubt the general knows a great deal about tanks, and in being so occupied with this, it appears that he has not kept pace with the results of an astonishing study which shows a woman’s anatomy allows her to drop her pants as quickly as any male, and in any event, women find it easier to relieve themselves than their male colleagues, who, as I understand it, often have difficulty in aiming.”
“Cheeky bitch!” Freeman had thundered, and was not won over until the intelligence officer in Heidelberg personally requested three minutes of the general’s time after Freeman’s intense briefing of the disastrous NATO situation.
“What’s your name?” snapped Freeman.
“Norton, sir. Major James Nor—”
“All right, Norton. You’ve got one minute. Shoot!”
“Sir, I’ve been tallying destroyed tanks by crew composition. Those Russian tanks with mixed crews are scoring better than all-male crews.” He paused.
“You’ve got thirty seconds left, Major,” growled Freeman. “I’m not a goddamned mind reader. Shoot!”
“Sir, it seems that our assumption that women would inhibit aggressive action — that male crew would want to protect the women and therefore withdraw — is incorrect. All the evidence suggests the opposite. With a woman aboard, male crews are afraid of being seen as, well—”
“As cowards!” said Freeman. “Yellowbellies.”
“Yes, General.”
“What’s your name again? Norton?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, Norton. We’ll put gals inside the turrets.” It was the kind of decision that endeared Freeman to field officers — the ability to cancel his own prejudice on the evidence and to waste no time in implementing a new tactic or strategy. “Mind,” added Freeman, “none of them over thirty-four.”
Norton was nonplussed.
“Their tits,” explained Freeman, pulling tje glove on harder, riding crop dangling freely from his wrist as he smelled the change in the air, still dusty and cordite-filled, blowing in from the battlefields to the east, but much colder, more bracing. “No big tits,” he continued. “Get in the way of the laser sights. Can’t get close enough to the eye cup.”
Norton looked for help from Col. Al Banks, the general’s aide from his Korean days, but help was not forthcoming. Sometimes Al Banks didn’t know himself whether the general was being serious or making a joke.
“Norton?”
“Yes, General?”
“We’ve got to do something about this Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. We need every man, woman, and jackrabbit we can get. Appreciate your report.”
“You’re welcome, General.”
Freeman was already walking back to his staff Humvee, buttoning his coat collar against the sudden drop in temperature that had resulted from an Arctic front, when he turned to Norton. “Major? How’d you like to be in my G-2? Get your ass out of that castle in Heidelberg to where the action is?”
“That’d be fine, sir,” Norton lied.
“Good man. Al, you see to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Norton, when you get yourself to Arnhem, I want you on aerial reconnaissance. Not afraid of flying, are you?”
“No, sir,” Norton lied for the second time that night.
“Good. You’re the kind of man who sees detail. Any ass can draw arrows on a map, but what I want is attention to detail. That right, Al?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know about Tae and the chopsticks, Norton?”
Norton looked blank.
“Well — never mind. I think you’ll work out fine.”
As he was getting into his Humvee, Freeman could hear the rumble of Russian artillery in the Oden Wald to the east. Like the bad weather also to the east, it was getting closer. Driving out of Heidelberg to catch his plane to Arnhem, he said to Banks, “Al, I want all aerial photographs for the last twenty-four hours at Arnhem HQ.”
“You’ve got that look again, General.”
“Have I? Well, I’ll tell you what else I want — a plan for a fighting retreat. Regimental level.”
Banks wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “Retreat, General?’
“What’s the matter — you got sand in your ears?”
“No, sir, but — well, sir, you’ve never pulled back before.”
“I’ve never been surrounded by four thousand Russian tanks before. And, Al, when we do start using women in the tanks, I don’t want anyone playing Sir Galahad and getting out of the tank for a leak. That’s an order, and I want it circulated to all commands. Northern, Central, and Southern NATO commands — what’s left of ‘em.”
Al Banks tried not to smile, but Freeman caught him. “Think I ‘m a rude son of a bitch?”
“No, sir, I just don’t think the men are going to obey an order that involves unzipping in front—”
Freeman’s voice grew cold. “Any man or woman who leaves a tank to urinate or defecate in action will be fined five hundred dollars and I’ll flail ‘em alive. Those Russian thermal detectors’ll pick up a ‘hot shimmer’ at a thousand yards.” He paused. “You know how I know? Because I bought one of the sons of bitches. On the black market when the Berlin Wall was getting holes punched in it and all the goddamn liberals and fellow travelers were having orgasms over ‘Gorby’ and thought it would be peace ever after. I’m not losing a single Abrams, not a goddamn one of ‘em, because some joker’s too embarrassed to piss inside his helmet. That clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing, Al. Those casualty lists we saw in Heidelberg show six crewmen killed because in defilade they spelled one another off. All six were crushed because the ground under the tank suddenly gave way under the weight. I don’t blame them. Underneath a tank’s as good a shelter as any. Besides, they’d just been shipped over — so didn’t expect it. Different geology than California. Still, their commander should have known better. We need every goddamn tank and man we can get. Now our G-2 tells us the Russians are stockpiling oil supplies in our own underground depots they’ve captured outside the pocket — safe from aerial attack. Meanwhile the bastards are pounding the shit out of our Atlantic oil and supply convoys. They keep getting clobbered, we could lose this thing for the want of a shell.”
Banks said nothing. As usual, the general was exaggerating — and as usual, he was right.