Chieftains (6 page)

SEVEN

At the 1st Battle Group Field Headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel James Studley was attempting to ingnore casualties in terms of human death, and view them instead as incidents requiring only tactical assessment. It was not easy. The British Chieftains being destroyed were
his
tanks, and no matter how hard he tried it was impossible to forget they contained the bodies of
his
men. Out there in the smoke were young troopers he had lived with, trained from civilian to soldier, congratulated, promoted, reprimanded. He had learnt early to hate the enemy.

One complete squadron of his Chieftains was already out of action, the vehicles destroyed, and the crews either dead or wounded. It had happened in the first few minutes of hostilities. The squadron's positions had been struck by a massive rocket attack that had immediately wiped out about half of Alpha Squadron's tanks. The fire on the Chieftains had been so accurate that Studley was convinced their location had been radioed back to the Soviet artillery by infiltrated or sleeper artillery observers, who must have been inside NATO territory well before the outbreak of war.

He had ordered the remaining tanks of Alpha Squadron to withdraw towards Königslutter, but before they could do so, further artillery fie and a strike by a formation of helicopter gunships had obliterated them.

The other two squadrons of the battle group had both suffered casualties in the artillery barrage. C troop of Charlie Squadron had lost all their vehicles although there were several crew survivals; all wounded, who had already been evacuated to the casualty collecting post at Burgdorf with the survivors of Alpha. B and C Troops of Bravo Squadron had both lost one Chieftain apiece, with no crews surviving. The leader's tank of Bravo Squadron had received a hit near the turret ring from an armoured piercing shell which had failed to penetrate, but dislodged the turret, crippling the vehicle and breaking the leader's right arm.

Studley, although he was finding it difficult to analyze the situation beyond his own frontage, had a clearer picture in the Elm Sector than most. Division HQ were keeping their battle group commanders reasonably well informed, and from his present field headquarters in the derelict barn, Studley could see far across the lower ground of the moor and northwards to the positions of the 2nd Battle Group between Helmstedt and the Hassenwinkel. South-west, but hidden by the ridge of high ground of the moor, was the 3rd Battle Group on the outskirts of the town of Wolfenbüttel.

The wind had veered to the south-east, and the cloud was beginning to break. The sky, in the direction of the coming weather, was bright. Later in the day there would be autumn warmth in the sun. Studley had been praying for rain; a torrential downfall to flood the rivers and turn the ploughed fields into quagmires, swamps beneath the tracks of the invading armour. Now, drawing on a lifetime's experience as a trout fisherman, he could sense the rising barometer and knew the weather would favour the enemy for the next twenty-four hours.

The heaviest Soviet attacks, on the positions defended by the battle groups of the 4th Armoured Division had, as Studley expected, come from the direction of Magdeburg behind the East German frontier. Here there was the autobahn and railway, which had undoubtedly been used in the reinforcement of the Soviet army in the past few hours. They would continue to make use of it until it was destroyed. The first heavy thrust of Soviet assault armour, following their artillery bombardment of the NATO forward positions, had carried them across the NATO border minefields. Under cover of further intense artillery fire and using dense smoke, despite their shattering casualties the Soviet army had forced the withdrawal of the 2nd Battle Group, pressing it quickly northeast as their spearhead attempted to widen the breach between the 2nd and Studley's group south of the main Soviet attack.

There were secondary thrusts in both the north and south of the 4th Armoured Division sector, one cutting north-west directly at Wolfenbüttel, the other towards Wolfsburg. The 3rd British Armoured Division to the south was under heavy pressure between the Oderwald and Goslar where the front had already buckled to a depth of eight kilometers; its battle groups were facing attacks from two directions as a result of successful landings of Soviet airborne troops and light armour.

Studley was now watching the advancing Soviet tanks through his binoculars. It was difficult, for their artillery was laying smoke ahead of them and the screen was effective. Occasionally the blanket of smoke swirled and within, for a few seconds, he would glimpse the dark hulk of some vehicle.

The battle group's two batteries of Abbots had been involved in almost continual activity, their gulls were already hot. Each carried forty rounds of ammunition for the 105mms, but would soon need replenishment. It had been nearly impossible for the observers to detect clear targets for them, but they were doing a useful job of work with local harrassing fire. To minimize the risk of accurate pinpointing of their positions, and subsequent retaliatory bombardments, Studley was keeping them on the move; a few quick shots and then away. Their movement on his situation map was beginning to look like a spider's web.

Somewhere deep inside the layer of smoke, the Soviet armour had reached the second line of minefields. Added now to the thunder of their artillery support were the satisfying dull thumps of the mines, and where they exploded the mist turned crimson and churned black with fuel smoke.

Studley had been attempting, with no luck so far, to obtain the use of a command helicopter. It had been promised but had not arrived. He wanted to get above the position, if only briefly, to obtain a clearer idea of the enemy's intentions. The information he was getting over the rear net from Division was frequently too broad to be of great use to him. It seemed to him his battle group ms facing the spearhead of a main Soviet thrust, but this could be a feint to lead him to commit his men when perhaps the real attack was yet to come, elsewhere.

The air activity had increased over the battle zone, though much of it was at a high level above the broken cloud. There had been a brief attack by three East German Sukhoi Su-15s, who had come in from high altitude in the east, lost in the glare of the rising sun, in a Mach-2 30-degree dive. AA-8 missiles had been fired into a position evacuated minutes before by the Abbots. The battle group had suffered no casualties in the attack that lasted only seconds, and the Su-15s had not returned.

His adjutant drew his attention away from the battlefield. 'Charlie Squadron are engaging, sir.'

'Good. Order them to retire as soon as it gets too hot.'

'Yes, sir.' The adjutant thought it unnecessary to tell his CO the identical message, with the coded reference, for Charlie's new positions had already been sent out on the net.

EIGHT

Inkester shouted: 'Where is it? I've lost it!'

'Calm down...there, two o'clock, on the edge of the smoke.' Sergeant Morgan Davis saw the T-72 as a dark silhouette through the 'times-ten' magnification of his sight. The Soviet tank was three-quarters-on to Bravo Two, bucking as it crossed the furrowed land three thousand meters away, swerving occasionally to avoid the wider craters in its path.

'I've got it.'

'Take your time.'

'Sod...the bastard's gone.'

'Steady...there.' Davis was using the coupled sight giving him an identical view to that of Inkester the gunner. The sights were settled on the hull of the T-72 as Inkester traversed the gun. The tank heaved upwards with the shock as the gunner hit the firing button and the propulsion charge detonated in the breech. With the engine on tick-over the roar of the gun was impressive within the confines of the fighting compartment. An automatic flashguard within the sight protected the eyes of the gunner and commander from the glare of the barrel flame, but smoke from the muzzle blurred their vision for a few seconds.

'Load Sabot,' ordered Davis.

There was a heavy clank of metal from the vertically sliding breech-block as Shadwell reloaded, and a mist of cordite smoke swirled inside the hull; most of the fumes were exhausted outside the tank, but some always drifted back. Shadwell shouted: 'Loaded.' He made certain he was well clear of the gun before he did so. Gunners could get a shot off fast if they had a target and to be caught-out standing behind the gun was a sure way to die as the recoil hurled it backwards. It was only one of several ways a loader could come to grief; more commonly they managed to get themselves caught in the traverse, getting a leg or foot trapped behind the charge bins as the gunner or commander swung the turret.

'Shit!' Inkester swore, not at Shadwell but because the burst of the Chieftain's 120mm shell was ahead and to the right of the Soviet T-72. As he brought the sight onto it again, he suddenly realized with horror that he was staring right down the black muzzle of the T-72's gun. Through his sight's magnification the T-72 seemed little more than two hundred meters away. There was a burst of flame from the barrel of its 125mm, and Inkester instinctively ducked instead of firing.

'Inkester! What the hell?' shouted Davis. There was an explosion on the slope forty meters to the rear of the Chieftain. Davis didn't see it, but he felt the ground shake and the violent thud of the pressure wave against Bravo Two's hull. The shell must have passed within centimeters of his turret...his head. He felt sick.

Inkester's sight picked up the T-72 again, and again the Chieftain's gun roared. This time vision was better as Bravo Two settled back on her suspension. The T-72 had begun to jink once the driver had realized he was under fire.

Davis seemed to wait forever, until he decided Inkester must have missed again or the shell had failed to explode. Then he saw a brief shower of sparks scatter from the foredeck of the T-72's hull to the left of the driver's hatch, and almost at the same time it exploded outwards like a movie scene in slow motion. He saw the two hatches on the turret fly upwards, followed by the turret itself and the driver's and engine hatches. Soundlessly, to Davis, the hull tore apart, belching a swirling orb of flame. He heard Inkester's awed voice: 'My God!'

Davis stared through the lens. '50 traverse right...one o'clock. Infantry combat vehicle...a BMP. Pick it up, Inky.' He felt the turret swing and dropped his eyes back to the sight. 'Good...good.' Inkester was silent, concentrating now, just as he would be at Lulworth or Suffield. The range was less than for the T-72 – thirteen hundred meters.

The Chieftain lurched. This time Inkester had fired quickly, but more calmly. The shell struck the BMP just under the thick sloping armour of its bow, and exploded on impact. The vehicle stopped as though it had run into an impenetrable wall. A second later Davis saw the eight infantrymen it had contained, and two of its crew who were apparently unwounded, leap from the vehicle and dive for the shelter of a nearby shell crater. He could see them clearly. Instinctively, he found them in the sight of the 7.62mm machine gun. The Chieftain's turret was moving again as Inkester sought another target. Davis corrected his aim, adjusting the movement of his cupola to oppose that of the turret. He pressed the firing button and heard the satisfying response from the gun; the bullets tore the lip from the crater in a burst of dust and earth. It was difficult to keep the fire accurate. One of the Soviet infantrymen scrambled from the shell hole and ran to Davis's right. He didn't bother to try to follow the man. The bodies he could now see in the crater were motionless.

Inkester had the main sight on another tank, a T-80 which had appeared at the edge of the smoke. Davis anticipated the explosion of the gun, but before Inkester could fire the tank swerved and began belching flame through ventilators and hatches.

'Blowpipe missile,' shouted Davis. He could see movement on the lower ground to his left. 'Some of our infantry. Why the hell don't they keep us informed?' There were shell bursts in the trees near the infantry position, and the smoke laid by the enemy artillery was much closer. The noise of the battle had become as great as that of the initial artillery barrage. Davis could hear the crump of mortar shells and feel the ground shivering beneath the Chieftain. It was like standing in a railway tunnel as a ten-coach intercity roared by.

He was about to try to help the infantry with prophylactic fire along the hedges beyond their position, when Inkester shouted again: 'Traversing right...three o'clock.' Davis saw movement at the edge of the barrage. Dark hulls in the smoke...the sudden flashes of white flame. Inkester began bringing the turret around.

The bank of earth three meters ahead of Bravo Two was hurled aside. The concussion knocked Davis backwards, his head smashing against the equipment behind him. He heard a second explosion and was thrust forward out of his seat. Someone was screaming...the interior of the Chieftain was pitch-black, the atmosphere thick with the stench of fuel and swirling dust. 'We're going to brew up,' thought Davis. 'Any second now we'll go.' Bravo Two was quivering as though it were alive. He tried to struggle upright, but could find no purchase for his feet. Shadwell was yelling beside him. There was a burst of light above, then a terrifying crash. The Chieftain's hull echoed...there was excruciating pain in Davis's ears. Bravo Two rocked as though it were resting on a water-bed, then something seemed to hammer down on the turret with terrible force, twisting the tank sideways, forcing it deep into the earth as though struck by a gigantic fist....

Magpie, the stay-behind-unit of the Royal Tank Regiment, had not suffered from the intense Soviet barrage that preceded their armoured assault. Few of the missiles and shells had landed in the strip of ground that included their underground bunkers, though they had felt the thump of explosions transmitted through the heavy clay to the concrete chambers in which they and their light Scimitar tanks were sealed. The position was shell and bomb proof, and even the heavily camouflaged entrance which was its weakest point was protected by an overhanging shelf of concrete looking, with its natural weathering and subtle design, like nothing more than an outcrop of limestone.

There was a sense of isolation making the men even more nervous. They were now totally cut off from the NATO armies; a small island, encompassed by an ocean. The war had swept past them, friends must have already died, but as yet they had seen none of the action.

Captain Mick Fellows hoped he had transmitted none of his own doubts to their minds. It was bad enough that he himself should be having misgivings about the entire project. And waiting through the long hours until darkness came again, and with it his final instructions from HQ, was making him even edgier.

What the hell was he doing here anyway? Volunteer? They'd said that; made him feel proud about it too, for a while. They had used an insidious form of pressure: 'Need the best man, Mick...someone reliable, cod-headed...any ideas? Important task. It'll do your career a bit of good!'

'Captain Fellows, sir.' It was Lieutenant Sandy Roxforth, one of his Scimitar commanders, at the observation platform. 'There's some movement outside.'

There were two periscopes built into the roof of the bunker, their view covering a full three hundred and sixty degrees around the position. Roxforth had been using the one which covered the area towards the north-east in the direction of the East German border town of Oebisfelde a few kilometers away. Beyond the first chequerboard of fields was the 248 highway following the line of the border. Fellows lowered his head to the periscope and adjusted the focus to suit his eyes. The field of vision was blurred at the edges where grass and small shrubs close to the position interfered with the clarity of the lenses. A pall of smoke drifted in the easterly wind, from the direction of the woods beyond Bahrdorf. The village itself must have come under heavy shelling. Even at this distance, its familiar outline had changed. The bell tower of the church was missing, and many of the buildings looked ragged. The devastated farmland no longer had the prosperous and orderly appearance of the previous day, the surface of the fields heavily scarred by shell, bomb and missile craters, the formerly neat boundaries destroyed and tangled. A grain silo some six hundred meters from the bunker was blazing, and through the periscope's magnifying lenses Fellows could distinguish the carcasses of a herd of Fresian dairy cows nearby.

Even as he examined the changed landscape there was a flurry of explosions around the village. It was like watching the silent movie of another war. The barrage intensified as though some artillery observer had called for an Uncle Target and all the guns of the division were joining in. Perhaps a Russian commander had been foolish enough to allow his armour to be drawn into the collection of buildings.

Much closer and, to his right where he traversed the periscope, he could distinguish the movement of enemy vehicles and he was attempting to identify them when the ground they were crossing disingegrate in one single eruption of fire and smoke. The giant explosion separated into individual shell-bursts. It seemed that nothing could survive in the holocaust that Fellows recognized as a defensive barrage from NATO aritllery positions to the west, but the dark armoured vehicles were pressing forward out of the smoke, joined by others on their left flank. Their charge was no longer ordered, the shelling had destroyed any semblance of formation. They were T-72s and T-64s, the latter easily distinguishable by the remote-controlled 12.7mm AAMG sited above the main gun. Close behind the battle tanks were a number of BMPs, tracked infantry carriers.

The artillery were now ranging on individual targets. He saw one tank swerve to avoid a deep crater, only to collide with another which had moved too close. He could almost feel the grinding of metal against metal, but the vehicles separated with a barely noticeable lowering of their speed.

They must have crossed the minefields south of Oebisfelde, and Fellows wondered about the casualties this must have cost them. The mines had been laid densely, and the invaders would have been under artillery attack as well. The tanks he was watching now, and the infantry combat vehicles, were the survivors.

'You want a closer look, sir?' It was Hinton, commander of the platoon of 22nd SAS. A lieutenant, there were no badges of rank on his smock. 'Use the other 'scope.'

Fellows walked with him in silence to the eastern end of the bunker, stepping through the groups of camouflage-streaked men who sat or lay on the concrete floor, many asleep. Hinton nodded towards the second periscope. Fellows put his eyes to the binocular lenses. He pulled his head back in surprise, then stared out again. Not fifteen meters away was the stationary hull of a 122mm self-propelled gun; on the slab side of its turret was a white circle, encompassing a red star.

He looked at Hinton and raised his eyebrows.

'We counted eleven of them,' said Hinton. 'They've positioned themselves in a line running towards the south-east.'

There were normally only eighteen SPGs to a Soviet tank division, thought Fellows. As they would have had to cross the minefields while under artillery fire, the eleven Hinton had seen were probably the only ones to have made it. And they were on the left flank of what appeared to be a Soviet division's main thrust. 'Are they all the same type?'

'I don't think so. There were others, with a flatter profile and a grill on the hull just forward of the turret.'

'M-1976s. Self-propelled howitzers. There's a lot of West German armour facing Oebisfelde, so these SPGs must be part of an encircling movement. The Soviet recce units have probably passed us further to the south.' It was tempting to use the VHF and get the information back to HQ; one quick air strike would remove the danger to the defending amour, who were probably already within the closing jaws of a pair of giant pincers. But they had been ordered to maintain complete radio silence; the men and vehicles encapsuled within the bunker already had their job to do. Regardless of anything which might happen out in the battlefields, they were to sit tight until contacted by HQ, on the evening of the first day of battle.