Up against the eccentric but brilliant American General Freeman, Marshal Kirov and his sector commanders were determined to avoid North Korea’s fate, when General Kim’s rapid advance down the peninsula outstripped his supply line, which in turn had made Freeman’s attack on Pyongyang so effective. Indeed, Kirov was convinced that it was precisely this kind of SPETS-like interdiction that had been the intent of the American airborne drops behind his lines. The shock exhibited by some of the captured American paratroopers, the marshal’s intelligence units had told him, seemed to indicate otherwise — that the American airborne had simply been blown off course.
“Yes,” commented the marshal sarcastically, “just like our SPETS units behind NATO lines. Blown off course and in American uniforms!” This got a belly laugh from the cluster of officers pressing in around Kirov, determined to be in the newsreel the Ministry of Propaganda was taking. It was a decisive moment in history — the impending and massive defeat of the American and British armies a certainty, something that one could look back on with one’s grandchildren.
“And this time,” the marshal announced, “we won’t be as stupid as Hitler.” Everyone laughed knowingly, including a young colonel of artillery who really wasn’t sure what the marshal meant. The colonel looked about for someone lower in rank. He saw a major on the marshal’s staff, standing away from the map table, hurriedly signing for receipt of motorcycle-borne field reports. For a headquarters, it struck the colonel as being as hectic as usual — an outsider would think it chaotic — but it was relatively quiet, given the slight radio traffic, all the important orders concerning the imminent attack on the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket being issued and received, at the marshal’s express order, by motorcycle companies. It struck the colonel as terribly old-fashioned. The colonel waited until the cameraman had finished at the map table, then walked over to the major.
“What does the marshal mean about Hitler?”
Normally the major would have deferred to the colonel, but a headquarters major in effect outranked a field colonel.
“You should recall your antifascist history, Colonel,” the major told him. “In 1939 Hitler pushed the British and the French right to the sea. At Dunkirk. They were trapped. Hitler could have—” The major glanced quickly at a requisition handed to him, scribbled his signature, and continued, “Hitler could have driven them into the sea — annihilated them. But he didn’t.”
“Why not?”
The major shrugged. “The fat man, Goering, wanted glory and persuaded Hitler to let the Luftwaffe bomb the Anglo-French into submission. Air force types always think bombing will do it — like the American LeMay in Vietnam, eh? Anyway, while Hitler halted his armor to let the Luftwaffe have its day, a British armada — everything from destroyers to sailboats — plucked the British and French off the beaches and took them back to England. The marshal won’t halt our armor, Colonel — or our artillery. You’ll be going all the way to Ostend. It’s the nearest port for NATO withdrawal. So you’d better get lots of sleep. Once the offensive begins, there’ll be no stopping.”
In Munster Town Hall, its walls already scarred and pockmarked by the big long-range Russian guns, Freeman walked past the ruins of what had been the foyer down into the basement headquarters of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, which had once been used to store the city records. With the cacophony of noise, a babble of radio traffic, of motorcycle messengers for the lines that had been cut and for the areas that had been jammed by the enemy, the scene was faintly reminiscent of the blue-versus-red games fought in the hot, stuffy headquarter tents of Fort Hood in Texas.
But there was something new, something he had never experienced before: the smell — not of men and women perspiring in high summer heat or overheated winter quarters, but the vinegary stench of impending defeat, heavy in the air. People were moving so fast that he could see panic was gripping many, only a few officers aware of his presence, perfunctorily saluting. His eyes took in the situation from one glance at the situation board, a long, snaking line of red pins marking the ever-expanding easternmost front of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket running north to south, the diagonal crisscrosses of Soviet armor creating a sharklike mouth, its jaws either side of the 250,000 men from the British Army of the Rhine, Bundeswehr, and what was left of the U.S. X Corps trapped inside, the Rhine behind them.
“It’s snowing heavily twenty miles east of us,” said a British brigadier, his face drained, eyes red with fatigue. “Might slow them down a bit, I should think.”
“Who’s commanding their northern sector?” asked Freeman. “Yesov?”
“Believe so, General,” answered the brigadier.
“Believe so or know so?” said Freeman sharply, taking off his gloves and helmet, dropping them in the nearest “IN” tray without once taking his eyes from the map of northern Germany, seeing the northernmost point of the 240-square-mile pocket, still held by the Allies, barely five miles away.
“Yesov,” confirmed the brigadier.
“Marchenko’s stable,” said Freeman, taking out his reading glasses, using the metal case to tap the area sixteen miles northeast of Bielefeld. “What we have to do is kick their asses back here beyond Oeynhausen — across the Weser.”
“May I ask what with, General?” said the brigadier pointedly, fatigue overriding caution.
“With determination, General,” Freeman told the brigadier, “and tanks.”
The brigadier was too tired to bristle at the inference, restricting his utterance to a description of what he called a “devil” of a logistical problem. SPETS commandos had apparently been reported in the area, and the two major fuel depots for the pocket had been blown.
“You mean we’re outta gas?” Freeman said, turning on him.
The brigadier called over his supply officer. “You have the figures on that petrol, Smythe?”
“Yes, sir,” answered the British major. “We’ve enough petrol for our most advanced tanks to run four or five miles out from the perimeter.”
The brigadier looked down at the major’s notes. “You said we had more than that.”
“You’ve lost the depot at Ahlen,” said Freeman, without taking his eyes from the board. “You also have fewer tanks than you had yesterday. Nine hundred approximately.”
The brigadier said nothing, feeling he had been set up by the American to reveal the deficiency of his own intelligence reports. Still, the brigadier was relieved that Freeman was, as the Americans would say, “on the ball.” He was equally resentful of the fact that while elements of the United States, Bundeswehr, and the British Army of the Rhine had been fighting and dying for almost five weeks in various stages of retreat, since the breakthrough at Fulda in the South, no one outside the pocket seemed to know just how punishing this high-tech war of movement had been on the Allied troops. Meanwhile the troops waited, apparently in vain, for NATO’s air forces to be resupplied enough so that they could do more than simply harass the Russian armor.
The war they had thought would be a quick push-button affair wasn’t quick, nor was it push-button. You pushed buttons, all right, but often nothing happened. For all the training in peacetime, the accuracy of laser beams standing in for cannon fire to save the exorbitant cost of live ammunition, there was no substitute for the terrible punishment of a high-explosive shell hitting an M-l ‘s reactive armor packs, which blew up and destroyed the shell but which couldn’t do a thing about the jarring impact that set sensitive electronic and computer circuits awry. Time and again the brigadier had seen high tech fail the retreating troops as the more simple, brutish Russian armor kept on coming, losing more tanks than the Americans, but with a four-to-one advantage, the Russians could absorb it.
“We can’t just sit here,” said Freeman. “Yesov’s a mover. Not the old Zhukov at all. He won’t wait for too much longer before he attacks. He’d prefer a steady buildup of men and materiel before he hits us, but given this snow cover for attack, he won’t wait.”
“Then,” said the brigadier, “he’ll run into our mines.” The British major couldn’t suppress a wry smile at his superior’s ready response. The mine fields beyond the perimeter were ample evidence that the British Army of the Rhine hadn’t exactly been sitting on their derrieres. The brigadier had spread his hand eastward out from the BD pocket, indicating the fan shape of the mine fields.
“He’ll clear,” said Freeman.
“If I may say so, General,” replied the brigadier, “I don’t see how. Oh, certainly — he’ll use his ‘roller’ and ‘flail’ tanks to move ahead, but that’s a slow business at the best of times. In this weather — I grant you he’ll clear here and there, but we’ve got two-man mobile antitank units to close them up again. Even if he gets through, he’ll pay an awful price. I daresay it would give him pause, General — if not stem the assault altogether.”
“You don’t have to justify stopping and seeding mines rather than standing your ground, General,” said Freeman evenly. “It was your decision and I wasn’t here, but if our intelligence reports are right, Yesov has at least a three-to-one, possibly four-to-one, tank advantage. We can gobble up as much of his steel as we like and he’ll still have enough to break through, spread north and south — split our forces in two, then eat them up — just like they did at Fulda. Russkies aren’t shy about repetition, General. If it works once — they’ll do it again.”
Freeman’s knuckles rapped an area on the map ten miles northeast of Hereford. “Reconnaissance has Russian tanks converging on a twenty-mile front about Bielefeld.”
On a tank-to-tank basis, Freeman knew that the M-1s had an edge on the T-90s, for though the Russian tanks had good laser and thermal range finders, the M-1s dug in with a much better defilade angle, or what the GIs called the “angle of dangle.” Freeman also knew the British brigadier had acted correctly, ordering the NATO tanks to dig in under camouflage nets, using the mine fields as a protective moat with mobile platoons of three tanks each, ready to rush any gap through the mile-wide mine field. But if the Russians should somehow break through the mine field on a wider front, the dug-in NATO tanks would quickly find themselves surrounded, and the mobile NATO reserves would be in danger of hitting a NATO tank for every Russian T-90 they missed.
The greatest danger wasn’t only to the men trapped inside the DB pocket, but a rupture through the mines would allow Yesov an end run to the Rhine. “If they cross the Rhine—” began Freeman. He did not need to say anything more, but he did, ordering, “All tanks and APCs to prepare for immediate counterattack. We’ll open the narrow channel through the mine field and break out — hit them with all we’ve got before they roll over us.” Freeman glanced at his watch, then, taking a blue marker pen from below the map, slashed three broad strokes at ten-mile intervals along the eastern side of the DB pocket. “I want them ready to roll at oh four hundred.”
“General,” said the brigadier, “a word—”
“What?” grunted Freeman. A word? He realized the Englishman wanted to speak with him in private.
Walking away from the babble and surging static of the “OPS” table, Freeman, his hands on his hips, waited impatiently for the British brigadier to make his point.
Surely, the brigadier told Freeman, their best hope was to simply keep “dug in,” let the storm slow the Russian advance. The Allies’ best hope, he argued, was to effect a stalemate behind the mine field, to buy time for NATO reinforcements of men and materiel. To hold out a few days— a week even — until what the brigadier flatteringly called “the clear genius of the American air force to resupply by air” would allow a NATO buildup.
Agitated, Freeman turned back to the wall map, thumping it with such violence that some of the blue NATO pins popped to the ground. A Bundeswehr corporal quickly picked them up again, but not before a sudden and noticeable silence ensued, as all operators’ eyes momentarily turned toward Freeman. The brigadier’s jaw was clenched, not in anger so much as in shock, while Freeman’s eyes, far from indicating any embarrassment, swept over every man in the headquarters basement. “Now, you listen to me. This isn’t a command post. This is a goddamned Tower of Babel, and it’s all about how the Russians have got us on the run. Well, we’re going to change that in—” he looked at his watch “—approximately six hours from now. At fourteen hundred hours. We’re going on the attack. Those tanks that run out of gas will siphon fuel from the APCs, those men in the APCs will ride on or behind the tanks. Do what the Russians do — rig up sleds. Prisoner intelligence tells us Ivan’s low on gas, too. Recon flights show they’re carting refueling drums, just as they did in all the prewar maneuvers. That means, gentlemen, his supply line’s overextended. Tell your battalion commanders that I want to see some initiative or tomorrow they won’t be commanders. I’ll break the sons of bitches to sergeants — every goddamned one of ‘em.”
Freeman stopped, but it wasn’t for breath. He wanted to make sure every man in the hut had his eyes fixed on him. They did. “Now I’m gonna tell you something else. It’s the last thing Yesov will expect. Every goddamned tinhorn reporter is telling everyone that the DB pocket is on its last legs.” He turned to the brigadier and the other British officers who had gathered to watch the mad American. “Why, last night even your BBC were telling your own people we’re about to fold. Well, we’re not going to fold.” He snatched up his helmet and gloves, pushing them sharply in front of him to underscore his point. “We are going on the offensive!”
There was silence; even the crackle of the radios seemed to have died. There were no cheers, no “ja!”s from the German officers present, one obersleutnant, lieutenant colonel, commenting to his colleage, “Kindlicher Qtatsch! “—” Nonsense.” Did Freeman, they wondered, really think that this “silly American football pep talk” would have any effect? Would he expect the headquarters company, most of them career officers, to be suddenly filled with elation?
Freeman certainly didn’t expect it. He knew that an order to the top-echelon commanding officers, no matter how forcefully delivered, was not enough to galvanize a dispirited army, and so within minutes he was in his command Hum-vee, its driver peering through the smudge of windshield as the wipers howled, heading through the blanket of softly falling snow to visit individual battalion commanders, Freeman noting the increase in Russian artillery, their distinctive thuds louder than the quieter thump of American artillery. “Cheap gunpowder,” he told his aide, Col. Al Banks. It was almost certainly the softening up before what Freeman believed would be a massive Russian frontal and flank assault. The NATO artillery battalions were firing intermittently, then-supply of ammunition dictating restraint, one that could not help but be noticed by the Russian divisions, boosting their morale even further.
“We have to keep telling our boys,” Freeman shouted over the high-gear whine of the Humvee, “that concentrated fire is far more effective than blanket random fire.” His aide found it difficult to concentrate with the rolling, crunching noise of the creeping barrage coming toward them from the Russian artillery around Bielefeld. The racket made it even more difficult to hear Freeman, who, as usual, insisted on standing up in his Humvee, gripping the top of the windshield, his leather gloves now covered in snow, the general seemingly oblivious to the increasing menace of the enemy’s artillery, the whistle of shot above them and the clouds of cordite, burning rubber, and fuel that, wafting westward, smudged the white curtain of falling snow. Freeman’s expression, beneath the goggles, was one of eager expectation.
“Looks like a kid at a fairground,” grumbled a GI, one of the bedraggled remnants of a reconnaissance patrol making its way back wearily to their battalion headquarters.
“He’s mad,” said one of the loaders in a cluster of 120-millimeter howitzers, the harsh, metallic aspect of the discarded shells now softening, melding into a mound of virginal white as the black spaces between the brass casings filled with snow.
With the Humvee nearing the perimeter, Al Banks heard the splintering of timber and an eruption of black earth only a few hundred yards ahead of them, his eyes, like those of the driver, frantically searching either side of the road for some kind of shelter, the pines of the forest too close together for the Humvee to hide in them. The road turned sharply to the left. Ahead they saw a small bridge had been taken out, one of the bridge’s elegantly carved wooden posts miraculously intact, its dwarf’s face smiling sweetly beneath a hiker’s hat capped with snow.
As the shelling increased, Banks thought that for a moment enemy intelligence must have somehow found out where Freeman was and “bracketed” his position, ordering its artillery to saturate the area. The driver, seeing a small forester’s hut in a clearing a hundred yards to the right of the bridge’s ruins, wasted no time in pulling the Humvee off toward it, the other two Humvees, one front and back of the general’s, braking and following.
Approaching the hut, Freeman saw it was unlocked and what he thought was movement inside. He spotted discarded ammo belts and empty cans. He saw the movement again — something orange. Drawing his pistol from the shoulder holster beneath his camouflage jacket, he flicked the safety off and opened the door. Inside the gloom he heard a huffing sound, like someone out of breath, as if they’d been running. Then he saw a blackened face gazing up, terrified, from a pile of Hessian sacks. The soldier, an American, didn’t move; the woman — her green-and-brown-splotched Bundeswehr jacket open, breasts rising and falling rapidly beneath her khaki T-shirt — reached quickly for her trousers, crumpled by her side. Looking first at the soldier as be grunted and rolled off her, she gazed up in terror at the general. Freeman saw the flash of Day-Glo orange, the woman clutching her trousers.
“Sorry… sir…” began the GI, his camouflage greasepaint catching the light from the snow as he scrambled awkwardly to his feet, two feet in one trouser leg, falling and knocking over a pickax and shovel in the corner of the hut.
“Where the hell’s your squad?” asked Freeman.
“Don’t know, sir. We got separated…”
The general holstered his.45. “Well, son, finish up here and get aboard one of our jeeps. We’re going up to the front. You—” He looked across at the German woman”—and your young lady friend can come with us. If that isn’t too inconvenient?”
The soldier was too frightened to answer. Freeman left the hut. “Goddamn it, Banks!” he said. “I’ve been in this man’s army for over forty years, and the incompetence we harbor never ceases to amaze me.”
The shelling seemed to have subsided, or at least passed beyond the immediate area, the Humvee drivers taking the opportunity to brush off as much snow from windshields and windows as possible.
“Take a message,” Freeman told Al Banks. “Immediate and confidential. SACEUR.”
Is it necessary to compound the danger to our fighting men by the issuance of Technicolor rubbers, which can be seen by the enemy at a thousand yards in snow conditions? The resulting injury to our men from enemy fire would be far more hazardous than that which you seek to avoid.
The message puzzled both Supreme Allied Command Europe and Commander in Chief, Channel Forces, in Northwood, England, until it was explained by an American liaison officer that “rubbers” were not “erasers” but American slang for condoms.
“Oh—” replied a brigadier. “Oh!”
Mirth in the British officers’ mess aside, SACEUR realized that the American general had a point quite apart from the fact that over 12 percent of all casualties in all armies were due to venereal disease — often higher than the casualty rate suffered in combat.
In any event, the story of the general’s encounter with the battlefield lovers swept like wildfire through the decimated ranks of American X Corps and other contingents around the perimeter, including those among the American airborne who had not been blown off course into enemy territory beyond the drop zone. By the time the story had reached Dortmund, only fifty miles in the rear, it was attaining mythical proportions and was completely changed, the story now being that Freeman “comes across one of our guys humping a Fräulein and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing, soldier?’ Well, this dogface looks up at Freeman and says, “This little honey bee if she’ll let me, General.” So Freeman says to his aide, ‘Al, you’d better promote the son of a bitch. Any man that quick on all fours deserves a battlefield citation.’ So his aide says, ‘You want him made a sergeant, General?’ and old Freeman says, ‘You make him a lieutenant. And that’s an order!’ “
Back at his headquarters in Minister, Freeman was told the story and, though he smiled, was curiously ambivalent about it. On the one hand, he told his aide, the story would probably do more to raise Allied morale in the pocket than a dozen speeches. On the other hand, the distortion that the story had undergone in the retelling disturbed him, for it was as clear an example as you’d want, he told Banks, of how “screwed up the simplest verbal exchange gets as it’s passed down the line.” No matter how sophisticated the communications equipment, all the more vital in a war of rapid movement, it often came to naught when messages had to be relayed verbally. The general state of communication glitches that had been reported from Heidelberg, before it fell, was one of the reasons he was so determined to reestablish personal contact with as many units as possible within the chaos of the shrinking perimeter. He particularly wanted to rally the airborne, who had taken a terrible beating, many of them, like young David Brentwood, who had fought with him in Korea, now reported missing, apparently having come down on the wrong side of the drop zone. Well, there was nothing he could do about those out of reach.
In the rear, the media army, most of them safely across the Rhine, were clamoring for interviews with Freeman once they’d heard the Fräulein story. Freeman’s press aide suggested to the general that it might be prudent before he spoke to any of the reporters to “rephrase” his response for home consumption.
“Hell, no!” was Freeman’s response, too busy in any case with trying to figure out how he would meet what he was sure would be Yesov’s massive and final assault upon the perimeter. “Doesn’t matter what you say,” said the general as he held out his hand impatiently for his map case. “Newspapers screw it up anyway.”
Freeman placed his forefinger on Bielefeld and, moving the second finger to form a divider, checked the rough measure against the map’s scale. It was twenty-seven miles east from Bielefeld to the Weser River. If only there were some way he could push the Russians back to the river, to suddenly reverse the position, to buy time for NATO reinforcements to pour in from the convoys that he hoped were now unloading at the British and French ports. The Russians had damned good Leggo bridges, but if they were forced to withdraw, the crossing would slow them down, giving the Allies a vital pause so that RAF, USAF, and Luftwaffe fighters could bring all the firepower they still had from their fast-dwindling supplies to bear onto the smaller, concentrated areas of the bridges. With hopefully devastating results. “You know,” he told his press aide without looking up from the map spread out before him, “that James Cagney never said, ‘You dirty rat.’ “
“No,” said his aide, somewhat nonplussed. “I didn’t know that.”
Freeman ordered the Dutch mobile infantry to close on what he believed would be the northernmost right-handed punch of the Russian armor. The Dutch had always been a concern for prewar NATO HQ. But recognizing the implications of being stationed farther away from the front line, they’d made up for it, developing a speed that had won the respect of even the Bundeswehr. “Well,” Freeman told his press aide, trying to boost morale with a little trivia, “Cagney didn’t say, ‘You dirty rat.’ What he did say was ‘Judy! Judy! Judy!’ “
When the press aide saw Al Banks walking toward the command bunker, the snow was falling heavily. As Banks took off his coat, the aide noticed he had a somber, pained look about him. The aide poured a mug of coffee for him and, handing it over, asked, “What the hell’s the general on about — Judy, Judy, Judy?”
“What—?” asked Banks, cupping the coffee mug in his bands. “Listen, we’ve just got Stealth infrared overflight photos that show the Russians are moving in three more tank regiments under this blizzard. Another two to three hundred tanks.”
“Jesus—”
“I think they’re just trying to frighten us,” said Banks, laughing. There was a hint of fatigue-craziness to it that unsettled the press aide.
“T-90s?” asked the aide.
“No. PT-76s apparently.”
“Well, that’s not as bad as the 90s.”
“Yes it is. I think the old man hates them more than the 90s. Nineties are like our M-1s. Great when everything’s going great, but one good bang and out go half the electronics. With the 76s, we’re down to VW Beetles versus Cadillacs. Sometimes the simpler the better — in weather like this.”
“Easier to repair,” said the press aide, eager to show he knew more than the usual media “flak.”
“Yes,” confirmed Banks, pouring more sugar into the steaming coffee. He could see Freeman at the situation board, a corporal, with a plug-in wire trailing from his headset, writing in the estimated strength and position of the Russian armored buildup with his marker pen. They had been using the small, magnetic block stickers, the kind civilians use for sticking messages on refrigerators, but they’d had a major foul-up near Heidelberg because the magnets on the big “tote” board had wiped a nearby computer disk clean. The result was a rifle company misdirected and lost. It was the sort of unpredictable screw-up that haunted all the commanders, Freeman especially, who confided in Banks that it was the “accidents of history” that worried him more than the enemy — the little things upon which great events can turn, despite the best-laid plans.
“Another thing about the PT-76s,” said Banks, “is they’re about half the weight of our tanks, Kraut Leopards and British Challengers included. Don’t get stuck nearly so easily in the slush. That’s why the North Koreans caught us with our pants down. Gave ‘em the edge.”
“This wet snow isn’t going to help them,” replied the press aide.
“Nope. What we need now is it to get a damn sight colder — drop well below freezing. That way we’d have hard ground.”
“That how we beat ‘em in Korea?”
“That and an uninterrupted supply line from Japan,” replied Banks, the worry lines in his face so deep, they made him look like a man twice his age. “If we don’t get a full NATO convoy through in three weeks — we’re sunk.”
“Jesus!” said the aide. “You really think we’ll lose the perimeter?”
Banks looked down at him. “Where’ve you been, Larry? We could lose the war. If I were you, I’d have a press release ready in case they bust through.”
The young press aide was visibly shaken. “Christ, I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“You’ve been reading your own press releases. No one else but the old man, our G-2, and those poor bastards right on the perimeter know. I’m just saying that meanwhile you’d better cover your ass. Not too much about our gallant boys at the front. If you pump up the public back home, they’ll turn on you if we get our butts kicked back behind the Rhine. Why do you think the old man won’t allow any TV cameras on the perimeter?” Banks drained the coffee cup. “It’s going to be the biggest attack since Fulda Gap.”
“I dunno if I can keep the media off that,” said the press aide, shaking his head. “Those TV guys are pretty persistent. Already there’s a stringer on the loose. One of my guys said he put on a groundsheet — no press insignia showing. We’ve lost track of him.”
“What’s his name?” asked Banks.
“Rodriguez.”
“There’s a thousand Rodriguezes. You have his accreditation number?”
“Yes — why?”
“We don’t want him doing a Vietnam on us. Not now— when we’re down.”
“I don’t see how we can stop him, Al. He’ll be hard to spot. I mean those hand-held videos these days are no bigger’n a Hershey bar.”
“Never mind,” said Banks. “You get MPs out after him now.” Banks had a faraway look in his eye. “I haven’t had a Hershey bar for—” He couldn’t remember since when. “And a Coke,” he said wistfully. “Not that goddamned flat shit they pump into paper cups. I mean a bottle. Glass. No friggin’ plastic. Just turning to ice — not quite. I mean, just about to.”
Depression was not unknown to Gen. Douglas Freeman, but it was rare. He was a believer in seeing the glass half-full, not half-empty. As a British commander of submarines had told him, in the end the best equipment could not stand up to the best morale. Witness the outmanned, outgunned Vietcong in the Vietnam War and the outnumbered “outradared” Nazi U-Boats in ‘44-’45. Nevertheless, Freeman’s habitual optimism, with which he imbued his troops, like the young Brentwood boy in Korea, was sorely tried when all Stealth overflight photos of the enemy prepo sites were presented to him as his mobile Humvee command post headed out for another sector of the front north of Munster.
As the machine-gun-mounted jeep bumped around the bomb-cratered road, Freeman found it difficult to focus the 3-D overlay on the latest aerial photos just taken within the last two hours. Perhaps, he told Col. Al Banks, there were the ubiquitous extra fuel drums on the Soviet tanks in the photos, but he couldn’t spot any. They had definitely been there in the photos from the earlier overflights.
He ordered the Humvee to stop, to look more closely and steadily at one of the T-90 turrets that the Stealth had picked up by infrared through the low ceiling of pea-soup stratus. “A lot of skirting around this turret, Al. Looks like some kind of spaced or reactive armor. Soon as one of our shells hits it — blows itself up. Most they get inside is a headache. But damned if I can see any extra fuel drums on the back. You have a look.”
“No, General, no fuel barrels I can see.”
“Goddamn it! Russkies always carry extra fuel. Two things you know about Russian armor is, those bastards break down sooner than ours and their materiel support isn’t anywhere as good as ours.”
Banks said nothing, and the general did not speak for several minutes, confirming to Banks just how worried his boss was. The general got out of the Humvee and, pulling his lamb’s-wool collar high about his neck, walked ahead, slapping his leg with his gloves. As he turned back to the truck, Banks slowly keeping pace behind him, the look of disgust he’d had when he’d gotten out was still there. “Damn it, Al! I just got through telling my field commanders — damn it, my whole strategy was based on telling our boys to pull back to defilade positions. Suck Ivan into thinking we’re turning tail-conserve our ammunition. Get those Commie sons of bitches overextended till their spare fuel drums are empty, then we go on the offensive. Hit ‘em with everything we’ve got.”
“I don’t understand, General. I thought you’d be pleased they’re not hauling extra fuel tanks. Limits their range.”
“I know, I know,” replied Freeman, his hand in the air irritably brushing Banks’s observation aside. “Gas drums are normally their most vulnerable spot. But in this fight they’ll outnumber us, Al. Four of their tanks to every one of ours. There are only so many you can stop like that — then the rest are all over you. No — what worries me is that no auxiliary gas tanks means they don’t need auxiliary tanks. Means they’ve got lots of gas, more than we thought, stashed in that prepo site south of Hannover.”
The general climbed back into the Humvee. “I’ve got to think of something else. Fast.” He was looking straight ahead, three other Humvees behind him and an armored car in front, but Al Banks was betting that what the general was really seeing was a map of the DB pocket.
There was a whoosh of air somewhere above them in the low cloud, followed by the chatter and rattle of machine guns.
“Holy—” began the Humvee driver, his voice drowned by the feral roar of an AA missile hitting an Apache gunship, the bug-nosed chopper momentarily visible in the orange ball of flame engulfing it. The Humvee driver put his foot down, swung the truck away from the deep pothole, and straightened it, oily smoke curling toward him. They hit the Humvee in front of them hard on its left rear fender and rolled.
By the time the men in the Humvees behind reached them down a steep embankment whose vegetation hid a drainage ditch, the driver was bleeding badly from multiple lacerations to the face. Al Banks was dead, his neck snapped, apparently in a swing blow from the barrel of the Humvee’s swivel.50 machine gun. Freeman was unconscious, his left arm looking as if it was broken.
“Watch it!” one of the soldiers cautioned. “Don’t move him.”
“Are you serious? I think he’s bought it,” answered another.
“General!” the sergeant was shouting, “General, can you hear me?”
“He’s dead,” said one.
“No he isn’t.”
“Close enough, Frank.”
“C’mon. Where’s that fucking medic?”