Five hundred miles to the east, on the snowy vastness of the alluvial Polish plain, the thunder of artillery was intense. Along the C-shaped front that took in Gdansk in the north to Poznan, 250 miles to the southwest, and Krakow, 250 miles to the southeast, the crashing of the artillery was so constant that it was said newborn babies were accepting the noise as normal. Since December 21, over a thousand Russian self-propelled 152-millimeter gun-howitzers, refueled by urgently rushed oil supplies from the Estonian shale fields, were mobile again and, together with the 2,037 lighter 122-millimeter guns still in action on the front, were laying down a wall of steel that had already destroyed advanced elements of the Dutch Forty-first and German Third Armored. And with blizzards moving in from the Baltic, advance Allied air cover was soon reduced to almost nil except for the all-weather ground-hugging Tornadoes whose British and German pilots were flying often no more than a hundred feet above ground level, denying Russian antiaircraft radar stations any telltale “bounce-back.”
The situation was made even worse for the Allies when the American helicopters, which had performed so magnificently at Fulda Gap when the Russian armored surges had first breached the NATO defenses, now found themselves hampered by lack of refueling depots. The helos, including the redoubtable Black Hawk UH-60—three-man-crewed air cavalry choppers, capable of carrying up to eleven fully equipped troops, antitank and antihelo missiles, plus M-52 mine disposal baskets — were fuel-limited to a hundred minutes in the air. Drop tanks could be fitted, but then the fuel weight/weapons equation shifted dramatically, making the missions doubly dangerous for the pilot. In short, as General Freeman was first to recognize in his forward HQ bunker less than forty miles from Poznan, his armies were the victims of their own success.
“Like small businesses,” he had told his aides. “All the business we want, fellas, and too little inventory.” After he’d broken out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, the speed of his advance from NATO’s central front had been such that urgently needed fuel, ammunition, and food supplies had either been slowed or stopped altogether in the truck convoys’ attempt to keep up with the troops in the blizzards sweeping down from the Baltic and the North Sea. In such weather, artillery notwithstanding, the opinion of most Allied commanders was that neither side could mount major offensives, particularly fighter sorties — NATO air forces, as much as the Soviets, thankful for the respite of the snowstorms so they could attend to the high levels of maintenance demanded by state-of-the-art aircraft. In any case, the pilots of the “super” birds like the F-15 Eagles and MiG Foxbats were presently as worn out as their fighters’ engines. Furthermore, apart from the Luftwaffe and RAF risking their Tornadoes in zero visibility, subjecting other billion-dollar airplanes and pilots to dogfights in blizzard conditions was a losing proposition. For the Allied chiefs, it was viewed as a good time to pause and consolidate. In this they were in concert with Washington.
Not so for Douglas Freeman. He wanted to press on.
“Give me a fuel dump, Lord,” Freeman declared, studying the headquarters map of the curving Polish front beyond Poznan, “and I’ll be in Warsaw in two weeks! In another week I’ll be over the River Bug into Russia.”
Without turning from the map, Freeman addressed his aide, Colonel Norton. “Jim, I’ve gotta have gas. By God, we’ll fly fuel in here by the pallet if we have to. Like we did it inside the DB pocket. Meanwhile I don’t want anybody digging in for Christmas. Get as much as we can as far forward as we can. We can’t stop. Attack! Attack! Attack! — that’s the strategy. That’s the only strategy. You start letting troops dig in, they start thinking it’s R and R. Start putting up pictures of the girl back home and their dog. Next thing you know, you have to stick a bayonet up their ass to get ‘em moving again. No, sir, now we’ve got the bastards on the ropes — finish them off. That’s the plan.”
“I needn’t tell you it’s a risk, General,” cautioned Norton anyway. “You could lose everything you’ve gained.”
“I know — I know. It’s against every military credo. But all we need is the gas, goddamn it! If we can get the gas up here, we can kick ass from here to Moscow.” Freeman paused, arms akimbo, looking up at the huge operations map, shaking his head. “We made one hell of a mistake, Jim — and I’ll be the first to admit it—” He paused. “Though I wouldn’t want that to get around.”
“What’s that, General?”
“That we — meaning everybody from the president down— screwed up royally when we thought that once we hit the Russian regulars, all their frappin’ republics would take advantage of it. Try like Siberia to break free of Moscow. Even help us. But—” the general sighed, his right-hand glove sweeping over the map beyond the Urals and the Caucasus. “—we should have known. Mother Russia isn’t politics. It’s an emotion. Republics’ll hang together to beat us, no matter they hate one another’s guts.” Freeman lifted a mug of coffee, holding it thoughtfully between his hands, still studying the map. “But I do believe the Baltics will be different. They’ll help us. Oh, not much — only a handful of troops compared to the Russians. But — look what Finland did in forty-one, Jim.” He put his coffee down, making short, skirting movements about the Russian Baltic seaports. “If they can harass the Russians, a week, ten days — long enough for us to drive a wedge here, into Lithuania, and out — we can do it, Jim. We can do it.”
“I hope so, General.”
“So do I.” It was such a shocking, unpredictable thing for the general to say — to concede even the slightest doubt — that it had the effect of jolting Norton.
“General.”
“No, no.” Freeman shook his head. “I have no doubt about my troops. About the ground war. What I’m alluding to, Colonel, is a matter of time. What I’m concerned about is that if we don’t hit hard, and fast enough…”He paused and took a sip of coffee.
“What, General?”
“That some bastard’ll push the button.”
Knowing the general as well as he did, what disturbed Norton most was that if the general had seemingly envisaged the possibility of the Russians going nuclear — then Freeman had probably thought of doing it himself.