Soldiers and Marines Saga, page 30
“What almost always works, when you see one fired, is to instantly direct suppression fire on the launch site so the operator gets hit or distracted. The Sagger’s hand held controls are so sensitive that even a little twitch is all it takes. You’ve got about 30 seconds, which is more than enough if you are ready. The problem, of course, is that you’ve got to be super alert so that you see the launch in time to respond.”
Then Yoram smiled primly, and added something important.
"Our anti-tank missiles and SAMs are better, much better."
******
The Detachment grew and grew, as we added more and more “African relief projects.” Dave Shelton, Charlie Caine, Mike Morton, and Davey Jones stayed; and so did Bobby Geither and Jack Riley.
But some of the staff has changed. Both of our initial Germans were promoted to colonel midway through their four-year terms, and are clearly headed to the top. They’ve moved on, of course. But now we have six carefully vetted German officers, four lieutenant colonels, and two majors. All of them are general staff officers, in the combat arms, whose careers, like those of their predecessors, have ostensibly stalled. They keep updating, and testing, our original panzer projects, and several others that are more recent.
One of newer projects the Germans are working on is our motorcycle “quick response” companies of missile equipped skirmishers. A new kind of motorcycle called a “dirt bike,” made it possible. These motorcycles apparently, or so I have been assured by our motorcycle riders, can operate in the woods, and over rough terrain.
The idea itself came from a successful Wehrmacht program during the closing days of World War Two. The Germans put motivated volunteers, meaning untrained kids, boys who were too young, and dumb, to know better, on bicycles, and gave each of them a panzerfaust anti-tank rocket to fire at the Russian tanks. The kids pedaled to wherever the Russians were reported to be attacking with tanks, and fired away. It worked.
We’re going to do something similar, except we’re going to put our shooters on “dirt bikes,” so they can speed to wherever they are needed, to fill gaps and cover retreats. Most of them will be armed with the latest Israeli built, hand held, anti-tank missile, and an automatic weapon, with a sniper scope and night vision; the rest with Israeli built SAMS, surface to air missiles.
And they sure as hell won’t be untrained teenagers; we’re going to use Rangers, Special Forces operators, and airborne troops.
******
Six months later we had the first of two thousand unchromed bikes in one of our warehouses. We bought them off the shelf from Harley Davidson for “export to Africa.” Each of them has an upward pointing special exhaust for the “ultra quiet running required in Africa,” and is everywhere painted a dull dark brown, “the preferred African color because it doesn’t show dust from their dirt roads.”
What’s really amazing is that the Harley Davidson people fell for the story, or, more likely, pretended they did. It was a big order.
Each of the bikes has a big, actually huge, brown metal “saddle bag” pre-loaded with a hand held Israeli anti-tank or anti-air missile, five days of canned food and water, an Israeli light machine gun with a night vision sniper scope, one hundred rounds of ammunition, a package of detailed maps on waterproof plastic, a pair of wire cutters, a claw hammer, and a waterproof sleeping bag. Each bike also has riding gear for and winter and rainy weather.
An army crew of six Mormon and Baptist mechanics sets up the bikes as they arrive, then fires them up, and moves them around, at least once every couple of weeks.
I can hear the noise in my office, and I’m thankful I don’t have to endure the theology discussions. Fortunately, everyone seems to get along amazingly well.
And we know exactly who will ride them and who will command their twenty-man companies, and the independent battalions in which they will serve. Every six months, starting a few years ago at General Speidel’s “request,” the German and United States airborne divisions, and all the American ranger and German Force Seven companies, began routinely surveying their men, and junior officers, to see which of them could type, drive vehicles, and what weapons qualifications they have.
One of the seemingly meaningless questions each man was asked was if he had ever owned a car, truck, or motorcycle. It seemed reasonable to expect, we agreed, that a man who owned a motorcycle would be able to ride one.
Phyllis Manly, One of Charlie’s clerks, the middle-aged wife of one of our permanent staff, Jim Manly, a master sergeant in our photo interpretation office, maintains a constantly updated list of the motorcycle riders who have completed either an anti-tank missile training course or a SAM course. The list she keeps is complete with their assignments to a specific twenty-man company that was part of a specific ten-company battalion.
There are usually about three thousand names on the list, consisting of Germans and Americans who know how to both ride bikes, and have been trained to shoot anti-tank missiles and SAMs.
Jim and Phyllis don’t know it yet, but Jim’s about to become a warrant officer.
What it means is that we can quickly get two thousand missile-equipped motorcycle troops, one hundred twenty-man companies, organized into ten battalions, to just about anywhere in Germany in less than twenty-four hours. We’re an equal opportunity employer; one thousand German paratroopers and Force Seven men, and one thousand American rangers and paratroopers, will be in the force we have organized.
******
Things were humming right along when Pettyjohn surfaced again. I was in one of the warehouses with Dave and Mike. We were going over some newly arrived equipment, when a request from Charlie Caine came over the intercom speaker.
“Brigadier Roberts please report to the orderly room.”
We looked at each other. “Uh oh. Sounds like trouble,” Dave said.
We always downplay our connection with the military, and very deliberately never use our ranks, and never refer to our office area as the orderly room. Charlie was sending me a message by using my rank.
Dave and Mike followed me to the front office to find out what’s up. The office lobby was filled with half a dozen shiny helmeted MPs, and three officers I’d never seen before. One of them was an American major general. Our visitors were, in turn, being carefully watched by three tough looking young men in civilian clothes, holding wicked little submachine guns, our Marines.
Gunny Adelson and two more Marines, also in civilian clothes, and also carrying submachine guns, came through the door behind them as I asked about their business.
“Who are you, and what do you want?”
“I want to speak with Brigadier Roberts”…. “Immediately,” he said somewhat arrogantly.
“I’m Roberts. What do you want?”
“You’re Roberts?” He seemed surprised.
I nodded with a tight little smile.
“I am Major General Williams, the Deputy USAREUR Comptroller,” he said even more arrogantly, “and we are here to inspect this facility and audit its books.”
“Really?" I said. “That’s funny; this isn’t an American Forces in Europe facility, or a NATO facility for that matter. Show me your orders.”
“Now you listen here, General or whatever you are. I’ve been sent to inspect this unit, and its books. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Show me your orders.”
This time I said it with more than a bit of menace in my voice as I reached my hand into my desk drawer, where I always keep a loaded pistol. Adelson, and the Marines, caught the tone of my voice, and stiffened up considerably. Their weapons began coming up, safeties were clicked off, and they instinctively began backing up to the wall to get clear fields of fire.
“I’m a General in the United States Army and this is a United States Army facility in Europe. I don’t have to show you anything.”
“You’re wrong,” I told him, now with real menace in my voice. “You, and the men with you, have made an unauthorized entrance, into a restricted French military facility, in an effort to obtain classified information you are not authorized to have. You’re under arrest.”
“Sergeant Adelson, have your Marines disarm, and search these men. Then take those who appear to be MPs out front, and guard them. You and your men are to immediately shoot anyone who tries to escape or resist.”
Adelson, snapped out an appropriate “Aye aye, Sir”
Williams was speechless, and his face was bright red. This was obviously not the reception he’d expected.
“Now General Williams, … or whoever you are,” I added sarcastically after a pause, “You will please step through that door into my conference room and either show me your orders or provide a very complete explanation as to who sent you and why?”
I asked Dave Shelton, Mike, and Charlie Caine to join us.
******
General Williams had no orders to show me. He blustered, and threatened a bit, and refused to answer any questions. So I picked up the phone, and called Dick Spelling’s office. It was well into the evening in Washington, but Dick was now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and, so it seemed, always on duty. He was still in the office when one of his aides, Colonel Armstrong, answered my call.
Two minutes later an increasingly pasty-faced Williams was periodically saying “yes sir” and “yes general” into the phone.
Williams finally hung up the phone, and was literally shaking as he attempted to explain.
“There has obviously been a major misunderstanding, General Roberts. General Spelling has ordered me to answer any questions you ask, and do exactly whatever you order. What can I tell you and do?”
“Who are you and who ordered you to come here and why?”
“Sir,” he’s so shaken he’s forgotten he ranks me. “I am Major General Harold Williams, the Deputy Director of Financial Services of the American Forces in Europe. Yesterday afternoon I received a call from the Pentagon, from a Major General Pettyjohn. He told me that there appear to be major improprieties associated with your command, and that I would be well advised to personally look into them. Obviously I have been seriously misinformed.”
Pettyjohn. That figures.
“What you are, General, is General Pettyjohn’s patsy in an internal service rivalry, the guy he set up to take the hit, instead of him, if things go wrong. And for you, they surely have.
“Okay,” I said almost to myself after a pause, and a bit of thinking. “No harm, no foul. And there’s no sense in letting Pettyjohn ruin your career. But let me give you my free advice, from one brother officer to another. Keep your mouth shut about this place. You, and your men, never came here, and you know nothing about it.”
Then I continued in a very stern voice.
“So far as you know, there is no such unit as this one in NATO. You never heard of this place, or this Detachment, and you don’t know anything about it, and you certainly never talked to me, or General Spelling, or anyone else about it. And you will never even so much as hint, or acknowledge to anyone, no matter what their rank, that you know this detachment exists or who commands it.
“Only if someone follows up with you, are you to even admit you made inquiries, and then the only thing you are to say to whomever inquires is that there are no problems, and that this is probably one of those useless units where the army hides troops with medals so they can build up their retirement pay without being promoted.
“What you will do immediately after receiving such an inquiry, must do to avoid being cashiered, is immediately contact me, no matter what the time of day, if anyone, of any rank, including General Pettyjohn, ever again asks about me, or this detachment, or anyone assigned to it. If you cannot instantly reach me, you are to immediately, no matter what the time of day or night, call General Spelling.”
Williams nodded and agreed with great relief. “That’s exactly what General Spelling told me. I’ll do it.”
******
At the moment, our biggest current project is to assemble the weapons, and supplies, needed to instantly, and I mean instantly, add a brigade of infantry, equipped with hand held anti-tank missiles and SAMs, to each of NATO’s existing German, American, British, and French divisions, all thirty-eight of them.
Each division already has its own artillery, helicopters, medical services, transportation, and supply chains. What they will inevitably run out of first, if there is a serious shooting war, are highly trained fighting men. So the question we’ve been kicking around for months is this—what else would a NATO division need if 3700 fully trained soldiers suddenly showed up with their personal weapons, and added an additional infantry brigade of six, 600 man infantry battalions to its ranks?
The answer we came up with, surprisingly, was not much; just radios and lots of hand held anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. The divisions can supply the small arms ammunition, and everything else.
After much discussion, we concluded that the radios, and missiles, an additional brigade would need to become fully operational, and highly lethal, would fit into fifteen big civilian moving company trucks, two big vans for each brigade’s six battalions, and three for the brigade’s command and support staff. In other words, to make this plan operational for each of NATOs thirty armored and armored infantry divisions, we would need to acquire five hundred and seventy civilian moving vans, and fill them with radios and missiles.
Our basic intention is quite simple—change the relationship between the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces by very quickly providing each NATO division with an additional brigade of highly trained, and fully equipped, combat troops. Each division would provide its new brigade with food, small arms and mortar ammunition, medical services, artillery support, and transportation; we’d provide the men, and their communications equipment and missiles.
And that’s exactly what we decided to do, if Dick Spelling can find us enough money “to increase our investment in African relief.”
In essence, we decided to quietly acquire, and assemble, each of the new brigade’s radios and missiles, and have them pre-loaded on civilian moving vans, and ready to be instantly delivered. When war is imminent we’ll drive the moving vans to their designated divisions, and marry them up with the troops being airlifted into Europe from the States.
“What this means,” I explained to Dick Spelling, “is that the troops for the new brigades will be able to fly in with only their personal weapons and find the rest of their equipment, supplies, and support services instantly available, and ready for them to use.
“In other words,” I told Dick with a grin, “we need to buy five hundred and seventy big civilian moving company vans for use in Africa. It’s quite a reasonable thing to do. Africa’s got a growing population, and people are always moving about.”
Dick liked the plan, and it was a go without NATO being involved, or informed. He found the money somewhere in the army budget, and we began quietly buying big civilian moving vans for “export to Africa,” along with a large amount of Israeli radios and handheld missiles.
******
Six months later some of the trucks, radios, and missiles had begun arriving, both by road and chartered cargo planes, and were starting to fill up two more of our old warehouses, the big gray ones inside the wire on the far corner. The rest of the trucks, and equipment, were either being produced, or were already on their way to us. We decided to park the equipment filled vans in the decrepit, and falling down, old French warehouses, without trying to repair the warehouses.
Dick and I know where the men will come from, though we never once mentioned it to anyone, not even the men working on the project—United State Marines. They’ll be flown in from the States with their personal weapons and, being Marines, hit the ground ready to pick up their ammunition, radios, and missiles, and begin fighting.
******
Including our Marine guards, we now have over a hundred officers, and men, in our permanent party. They were carefully selected by Charlie and never appear in uniform. For the most part, they are married Marine guards and army enlisted men, working as mechanics, and missile technicians. We bus them in each day from the relatively large American base at Metz where our transportation company is stationed.
The French in the surrounding villages, I hope, believe the men who arrive each morning in the two yellow school buses are supporting an international civilian aid organization that sends equipment, and supplies, to troubled African governments—at least that’s what the sign on our front gate implies; the enlisted soldiers, and Marines, think we are getting ready to support an African government that is about to be threatened by an armed revolution.
In fact, the only people who knew what we were really doing at the detachment, and why, were our permanent staff of less than twenty officers plus the German General Staff officers who have completed their four-year tours with us and gone back to the Bundeswehr. That’s still too many but there you are.
Despite the risk of leaks every time we add another member of our senior staff, we were in the process of adding another photo interpreter, and another air mission planner, and expanding the fence, patrols, and surveillance cameras around our compound to enclose five additional warehouses.
One of the newly enclosed old warehouses will handle the equipment and supplies we’ll need for our newest program to “improve” certain African economies located immediately to the east of Germany. We’re going to improve them by using airborne troops and rangers to drop in and “service” their utilities such as power plants, oil pipelines, refineries, and airports.
And there was news on the home front. “We are pregnant again,” my love cheerfully announced, just before she rushed upstairs to the bathroom to throw up.
Chapter Fourteen
Today was our blackest day. Eddie Reynolds, Franz Reuter, one of the new German Oberstleutnants, and I were in what passes for our conference room. We were going over the plans, equipment requirements, and operational orders to drop American Rangers, British SAS and paras, and the men of the German Army's Force Six, onto nuclear power plants in East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. All of a sudden there were screams, and seconds later someone in the front office threw the alarm switch, and the alert siren began screaming.
