In Germany, the British Army of the Rhine was fighting for its life in the fifty-five-mile-wide pocket between Bielefeld and Dortmund, where swarms of Sukhoi-24 Fencer ground-attack fighters were wreaking havoc on the British tanks.
The Sukhois, chosen in part for the relatively narrow swept wing width, and painted in green-brown blotch camouflage, had been crated by rail through Poland and the GDR weeks before, reassembled, parked and maintained in the vast Nordhausen tunnel complex in the eastern part of the Harz Mountains, where Hitler had made his V–Is and V-2s out of range of Allied bombers. Rising swiftly, behind a semicircular screen of SAM sites in the Harz foothills between Nordhausen and what had been the West German frontier, the Fencers streamed northeast over Stolberg. Swooping down through cloud over the tranquil bluish green of the Harz, they reached the British army’s defensive position a hundred miles west along the Bielefeld-Dortmund line in less than nine seconds, their terrain-avoidance radar and laser target-seekers cutting through the battlefield’s smoke cover, setting the Challenger tanks ablaze.
When the Challengers fired, their aim was deadly, and they fought hard, even as they fell back northward behind the Weser and Mittelland Canal. The British were taking terrible punishment as well on their southern flank, where East German motorized shock troops were now crossing in force, so that in the depression between Bielefeld and Dortmund, what had been a fifty-five-mile-wide defense base now shrank to thirty-five miles.
As the Russian Fighter/Interceptors streaked down, pouring a deadly hail from twin-barreled twenty-three-millimeter cannons, a British commander watched his battalion of forty tanks and support infantry being systematically destroyed. Here, unlike Fulda, where American and Russian tanks were too close, the Soviets’ gasoline bombs tumbled down — and with such apparent aimlessness, it seemed they could do no harm. Then the big silver “jelly beans” would burst, the saffron fireballs rolling over the velvet green hills. To the men inside the Challenger tanks, whose reactive armor had worked so efficiently in blowing up the Soviets’ earlier high-explosive antitank bullets, the napalm was an agony worse than any gunfire, their bodies becoming torches, all but impossible to extinguish. As one man would try to smother a comrade to snuff out the flame, the jellied gasoline would fly onto the would-be rescuer, the droplets of red-hot mercury sticking to flesh and clothing — often as not, killing two men instead of one. On many occasions British infantry caught by the napalm not only died a screaming death themselves, but proved deadly to comrades as the heat from their burning bodies set off their own ammunition.
The Soviet Fencers supporting the GDR advance did not have it all their own way as the NATO air forces rose to meet them. But the overwhelming numbers of Soviet and Warsaw Pact fighters meant that the NATO fighters trying to contain breakthroughs on the Northern Plain, in the center along the Fulda axis and in the south on the alluvial flats of the Danube, were stretched too thinly, the NATO commander not knowing where the twenty Russian divisions held in reserve would be thrown in, therefore unable to concentrate wholly on any one sector.
It was a Soviet-Warsaw Pact strategy designed for the quick win, to push NATO so far, so quickly, that in the case of a ceasefire ranovato—”early in the game”—the Soviet-Warsaw Pact would have in its possession at least a third of West Germany and a sizable strip of Holland 50 miles wide and 130 miles long north of NATO’s air-control center at Gelsenkirchen.
The NATO pilots were exacting a high price, but against all the other intangibles of battle was the stark mathematical fact, known for years before the war, that NATO could not outlast sheer quantity, even with a kill ratio in the air of two to one in the first seventy-six hours.
On the ground the situation was worse, the tank commanders facing Sergei Marchenko and the other ten thousand Soviet tanks having had to maintain a four-to-one kill ratio merely to hold ground.
In the wake of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact three-pronged attack, the old confident air among NATO commanders about Western quality versus Russian quantity took on a decidedly hollow ring.
Leading three other F-16s, one of the NATO pilots, Colonel Delcorte, his F-16 still climbing though getting low on fuel, was in his fourth sortie within seven hours. Based in Hahn with the U.S. Tenth Tactical Wing, Delcorte now had only fourteen of his twenty-six-plane squadron left. Ten were downed outright; two had managed to return to Hahn but were badly shot up.
Of the ten downed planes, three reported bailouts: one’s chute was seen high above Fulda Gap, presumably drifting down over East Germany, the other two pilots picked up southwest of the Bielefeld-Dortmund basin in a heavily wooded section serving as revetment areas for the battered Chieftains. The British-made battle tanks, which, though first-rate and well armed with 120-millimeter cannons and assisted by crack British infantry regiments from the Army of the Rhine, were doomed because of their slower speed compared to the Russian T-90 A’s seventy-five kilometers per hour. Had the Chieftains more time to dig in, it might have been a different story, for as Sergei Marchenko and fellow S-WP tank commanders quickly realized, the breakdown rate of the Soviet tanks was much higher than for those of the Allies. But though the British Chieftains were well served by their appliqué Chobham armor packs and first-rate crews, they could not overcome the Russians’ three-to-one superiority in tanks.
At Fulda Gap, where the Russians had been unable to use their jellied gas bombs, the latest British Challengers, German Leopard IIs and American M-1s lasted much longer in battles where foam-filled, self-sealing rubber fuel tanks took many direct hits from armor-piercing shots without exploding.
In the Bielefeld-Dortmund area, The Russian T-90s, built to accommodate the shortest Russian tank crews and so presenting the lowest silhouette of any main battle tank, swung out wide through the British Chieftains’ heavily laid white smoke screens and regrouped in ambush, isolating several Chieftains at a time. In the process, the smoke- and dust-filled battleground confused the pilots of the American Thunderbolts, who had to make split-second differentiation between Russian and British tanks — this becoming increasingly difficult in the dense smoke as the day wore on. It was, Delcorte thought, his F-16 leveling out high above the smoke, as terrible, or from the Russian point of view, as good, an example of using superior numbers as you could get, quite literally mugging the opposition with sheer brute force and size.
The only hope, Delcorte knew, was to keep going up, keep engaging them until the Juggernauts’ attack was blunted, when finally there would be so many tanks off tread, so many automatic shell extractors in the T-90s out of alignment due to overheating and crews’ fatigue, that the West’s overall superiority in technology, including more tank transports, would start to pay off. Delcorte took some hope from the fact that NATO’s Medevac and air crew rescue units were of uniform high quality. This was a crucial factor if NATO pilots were to fly and fight again. Delcorte and the other three F-16s in the finger four formation, resembling the spacing of a right hand’s four fingertips, the little finger farther back, entered heavy cloud. At six thousand, Delcorte was still in it, the other three pilots in the clear, the wingman on his left advising him there were “Bogeys — six of them at one o’clock. Seven thousand.”
“Keep going for the top,” Delcorte instructed, the prearranged ceiling having been ten thousand feet, from which they hoped they could dive down upon the funnel leading to the Fulda Gap.
“Bogeys below — nine o’clock,” came the next report.
“Go for the top,” Delcorte repeated evenly, though in fact he had a multiplicity of incoming messages and warning signals, all of them conflicting, during his effort to outclimb the Bogeys coming in from the east, ignoring those passing below en route to shoot up the withdrawing Americans of the Black Horse division.
It was tempting to Delcorte to break the four-plane formation and go into two fighting pairs, a leader and wingman, the latter watching the leader’s COV — cone of vulnerability. This would leave him, as the flight leader, free from blind side attack if he dove in to break up the enemy formation. He was also tempted to go to a fluid four formation, having two of the F-16s a thousand feet abreast in front, the other two, ten thousand feet apart behind. All these options sped through Delcorte’s head in a split second, then, seeing the Soviet fighters still climbing, trying to get an advantage over the Americans, he forgot Fulda Gap and decided to attack.
Once the combat began, the geometry of flight formations was lost, two Soviet Foxbats winking orange, then gone in cloud, the air-to-air Acrid missiles streaking toward the American Falcons in excess of fourteen hundred meters a second, the faster F-16s already breaking, their pilots hitting the superchargers, climbing fast, trying to expose only their cold side to the Foxbats to deny their afterburners’ exhaust to the heat-seeking Acrids. One American turned too late, and a dirty orange burst lit up inside a cloud, followed by broken thunder. The other three Falcons were on the northern flank of the Foxbats, who now had separated, three going ahead to Fulda Gap, three remaining to engage.
Watching his HUD — head-up display — afterburners on full, going air to air, Delcorte saw the green impact line on the HUD, where graphics condensed a thousand variables to a single display. The target vector was arcing right, cutting through three parallel lines. There was such a jumble of chatter, radio cuts from the Technicolor spread of the tank battles far below him, fragments of other NATO feed-ins, aerial and ground control, a smattering of Russian, that Delcorte, feeling he was ODing on noise, shut them all down except for that of his own formation. He rolled the Falcon, tried for a scissors, turning hard left, and was on a Foxbat’s tail. One hundredth of a second later, the HUD’s three green horizontals were cut by a green arc ending in a dot. Delcorte flicked the stick again. The dot moved toward center. The Foxbat banked hard left, Delcorte’s lines altered, the dot slipping below the line, Delcorte cursing, flicking the stick again, not worrying about sighting the Russian’s afterburner, sliding in with the cannon. He flicked one, twice more, but held his fire — at this angle the Foxbat could outrun his bullets. The green dot shifted, centered. He pressed the red, the.20-millimeter cannon sounding like a rip in the fuselage. He saw parts of the Foxbat breaking off, pulled away before any more came at him.
Three Foxbats had been destroyed by the three Falcons, but the NATO air force’s problem, here as elsewhere, was starkly evidenced by the encounter. The American Falcons had killed the three Russian MiGs, but with the Soviet-Warsaw Pact’s 3,000-plus fighters against NATO’s 2,070, not counting the Soviet fighters in Russia, the deadly equation was still there.
Since the first sortie at dawn, Delcorte had lost sixteen pounds, but now once more he, like the other three Americans, felt exhilarated by the kill as they now headed down to bomb and strafe the long supply columns stretching out across East Germany, the enemy’s breakout all along NATO’s front from Austria to the Baltic continuing unabated. Delcorte’s right wing-man fired a Sparrow from twenty miles at a Soviet swing wing. He ‘d mistaken a Flogger MiG-23, equipped with a “High Lark” fifty-mile range nose radar, for a Flogger D.
“Save the heavy stuff,” Delcorte cut in. “Only when we need it.” He was reminding the pilot, but not saying it on open channel, of what they’d been told in the ready room that morning — that NATO’s supply of all AA and AS missiles was dwindling until the convoys got through.
The MiG-23, at the end of the Sparrow’s maximum range, dropped a pod of flares, or “highballs,” as the Americans called them, the MiG rolling away at relatively low speed, reducing the temperature of its exhaust. While the MiG pilot hoped to obmanut’—to “sucker”—the American missile to one of the flares if it was a heat seeker, he momentarily disengaged his radar as an added precaution, just in case the missile wasn’t a heat seeker. It saved him, die Sparrow made to home in on radar signals, not infrared.
“I’m gonna get me a Phoenix,” complained the wingman in disappointment. “No evading that baby.”
Delcorte said nothing other than to tell the others to follow, peeling off to attack a goods train winding through the foothills of the eastern Harz Mountains. “Note for debriefing,” Delcorte told the others. It was the first train they’d seen moving in broad daylight so close to what had been the border between the two Germanys. Running trains in the daytime was dangerous in any war, even though, contrary to public belief, a rail link was extremely hard to put out of action for long, even with state-of-the-art jets. A daylight run might mean, however, that supplies at the front were running dangerously low. If this could be confirmed by Allied intelligence pilots in other sectors, it could be important for NATO to launch counterattacks with fewer NATO troops now rather than waiting later for a buildup. “Who’s got the Brownie?” asked Delcorte.
“I have,” answered his left wingman.
Delcorte knew he should have known who was on camera, but after three sorties today, five the day before, twelve — no, thirteen — planes down, the detail of who was designated “re-con” duty had escaped him. “Get a shot of that?”
“No problem.”
For a moment as they went below ten thousand for the attack run, Delcorte saw the humps of mountains where there was no evidence of fighting, even though he knew that on the other side of the range there was the beleaguered British Army of the Rhine, Dutch troops trapped with them. Farther down, more NATO divisions, primarily Americans and West Germans, were trying to hold ground on the central and southern front, so that to anyone west of the Harz, the whole planet must seem afire with war. Only here, high above, could one appreciate the fact that there were areas that the war had not yet touched.
On the first run in, the train, mostly boxcars, rounded fuel wagons interspersed with quads of antiaircraft guns, was going into a long, slow turn over a canal. “Bingo!” called one of the other pilots, signaling his fuel warning light was on and that he was breaking formation, heading back to base.
Delcorte centered his two five-hundred-pounders, released them, felt the plane buffeted by wind sheer as he climbed, the bombs bursting either side of the line but close enough that their craters tore out rail lengths. The train wobbled for a second.
“Beautiful, Colonel!” came another pilot’s congratulation as he, too, headed back to base.
The train now looked like a chopped-up worm, the rear section thrown helter-skelter off the rails, only the front cars, about thirty, still upright but off track, one, its side split, spilling a load of sulfur, the yellow in stark contrast to the green fields by the track. But Delcorte knew that derailing the train would delay it only a matter of hours, and so he and the remaining F-16s came in again, Delcorte leading.
He never saw the missile — only felt a thump somewhere on the fuselage and the F-16 shaking violently. He pulled the stick back and gave her full power. He was climbing, but barely, and it felt like a heart-testing machine that, no matter what he did, would not allow him to go faster, sweat pouring from him, instruments jiggling, fuel warning light on, a pins-and-needles sensation in his right leg. He was at three thousand. Quickly he tightened his harness, pulled his legs hard together, reached up overhead, gripped the two ejector rings, and pulled them down over his front.
With the sound of a pistol shot, the cockpit was gone — the ejection the most violent shock he’d ever felt — and all he could think about was whether the pins and needles in his right leg meant he was shot up, the walls of blue sky, spinning cloud, and green fields, the brown of a farmhouse coming up at him. For a second he was convinced the chute hadn’t opened, but then, quite suddenly, he seemed still in the air, the drag weight growing heavier under his arms, and he had the sensation of actually moving upward though he was still drifting down, a good seven miles from the train — now a thin, black line in the Harz’s purple foothills.
When he landed there was still not much feeling in his leg, but he could see he wasn’t shot. He made no attempt to hide the parachute as it was inconceivable to him that though he was in the countryside, anyone would have failed to see him land. But when he spotted the truck, green-uniformed troops standing in the back against the wooden slat side, he began pulling the parachute in, feeling, oddly enough, that he’d be in trouble if he didn’t. Littering. He knelt down by the camouflage-patterned chute, took out his standard-issue.45, placed it on the chute, felt for the emergency ration pack, slipped the packet in his flying suit, and stood up, hands held high, walking well away from the sidearm so there’s be no possible misunderstanding.
The truck stopped ten feet from him, and a stout GDR “Home Force” officer came out, pistol drawn, looking grumpily at him and walking over with the exaggerated stride of a minor official, peering at the chute and the.45 but touching neither, as if there might be some booby trap. Then he started shouting at Delcorte, pointing in the distance to what presumably was the train wreck.
The other door slammed and a woman in khaki came bustling out, yelling at the man in what Delcorte was pretty sure was Russian. The man tried to cut in several times, but she wouldn’t let him and kept shouting at him. Delcorte felt ridiculous but didn’t figure this was the time to grin, let alone laugh. But for some inexplicable reason, perhaps because of his fatigue, he began hiccupping. He thought of Emily, his fifteen-year-old, who had given him her “recipe” for curing the hiccups: “Swallow a glass of water, hands up high, and hold your breath.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, truly, Daddy. Try it.”
Delcorte heard the Russian woman walk to the parachute, then she was beside him. Cupping her hand over the.45’s hammer, she fired once. The hole was very round and she was relieved nothing had spat back on her uniform as the American flyer staggered, legs crumpling like a rag doll. The East German said the American was still looking at them, but the Russian officer told him that was nonsense. He couldn’t possibly be alive. In any case, it was quite clear to the East German that she wasn’t going to waste another bullet as she walked over and put the.45 in the American’s right hand.
She went back to the truck and returned with an old Voigtlander camera.
There was a loud argument about the correct exposure, as it was getting dark and the old Vito B camera didn’t have a light meter.
“F5,” said one of the soldiers.
“No, no. F8—or it will be washed out. You’ll see.” The Russian woman said they’d better make up their minds because soon there wouldn’t be enough light left and Berlin wanted just such a photo to show the world how the American terrorist bombers, so shamed by what they’d done, preferred to commit suicide than answer to the people.
“No one will believe that,” one of the younger soldiers said scornfully.
“That’s not the point, Comrade,” the Russian told him. “It will tell the people what to do with American pilots.” She went to click the camera and discovered the film hadn’t been advanced. There was a murmured insult about Moscow know-it-alls. She ignored it.
“He’s still moving,” said one of the soldiers.
“Suicides don’t shoot themselves twice, Comrade,” said the Russian.
“What do you mean, Comrade Lieutenant?” the soldier asked her.
“Think it out for yourself,” she said. “Put him in the trunk.”
He was so heavy, it took four of them to hoist him aboard, his head lolling, completely lifeless now in the lavender light of autumn sky, two of them turning their heads away in disgust, the other two, in their late teens, laughing hysterically.
“What is so amusing?” asked the Russian officer. She was from the Political Corps, whose members were stationed in every Warsaw Pact village and town to help render “fraternal assistance” to Russia’s allies.
“He is making a bad smell,” said one of the giggling youths.
“It is quite natural,” she said.
Earlier that day, in southwestern Germany 450 miles away, a twenty-six-year-old American lieutenant and a Lance missile’s crew of three had readied their truck under camouflage netting. They were in a clearing deep in the heavily wooded area on the German side of the French-German border over ninety miles west of the confluence of the Isar and Danube. In the pine-scented air mixed with the acrid odors of the battle raging barely fifty miles east of them, the first of the conventional warhead mobile launch batteries to fire in World War III was in the countdown.
“Five, four, three, two—” The American lieutenant turned the switch, and with a feral roar the twenty-foot Lance streaked up the ramp on its forty-mile journey eastward toward the Czechoslovakian- and Russian-led tank divisions pouring through and over the alluvial flats of the Danube. The moment she had closed the circuit, Lt. Margaret Ford snapped closed the lid of the khaki “shoot and scoot” box. “Okay, let’s go!”
The three-man crew needed no encouragement, for all of them knew that within five minutes of the rocket’s firing, the Soviet-WP detection units on the Czech-German border would have them vectored in and they’d be under counter battery fire.