Soldiers and Marines Saga, page 39
In less than 30 minutes the F-15s are ready to fly again, but not with Owens and his men. This time fifteen of the squadron’s other pilots climb in with a new “Jolly One,” the squadron’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joe “Speedy” Gonsalves of New York, a former Princeton half back, in command—the rapid “pit stop” turnaround, pioneered by racing cars and proven by the Israeli Air Force during the Six Day War, had long ago been adopted by the United States Air Force.
Forty-five minutes later, after a trip to the latrine, a cup of coffee, a ham and eggs sandwich, a candy bar, and a brief stop for a status report and updating, Owens and the first group of Green Giant pilots returned to the flight line to wait again for their planes to begin returning. This time thirteen return including Speedy.
Owens and his men met the returning planes on the tarmac and got brief updates shouted to them from their fellow pilots as they climbed out of the cockpits. As each plane’s frantic pit stop rearming and refueling got underway, Owens and the pilots assigned to its next sortie climbed in so they would be ready to begin the squadron’s second high speed turnaround and departure as soon as each of the plane’s crew chiefs, its “owner,” gave his pilot a thumbs up and salute.
Twelve planes headed for one of the active runways and took off together without even slowing down. One plane was delayed for a fast swap-out of a failed radio. In about ten minutes it would leave by itself and be hooked up with another NATO flight.
If Owens and his pilots get back from this mission unharmed they will each repeat the rotation two more times before being forced to stop for their mandatory eight hours of sleep. Other Green Giant pilots will take their place so long as each plane lasts.
This time the Green Giants were vectored north towards Erfurt. And this time their AWACS controller was British and a woman.
“Hello Jolly One with twelve. I have some trade for you. Proceed buster course 56degrees and go to 66 thousand. Links in approximately one-twenty. Stand by.”
A new Russian AWACS has just taken off from Erfurt and begun radiating. Due to the Warsaw Pact’s spotty communications and strongly entrenched tradition of not admitting problems, neither the AWACS crew nor the fighters guarding it fully realize what has happened to the other Russian AWACS and why their radar receivers aren’t working properly.
The AWACS crew started listening to desperate pilot reports and calls for guidance even before they took off for the 0217 scheduled beginning of the war. They know something is terribly wrong, but they don’t know how wrong or why.
They were about to find out.
The Warsaw Pact squadrons and command structure, under strict orders not to begin fighting too early, and not yet fully understanding exactly what was happening, continue to adhere to their invasion-based flight schedules. Accordingly, and still right on schedule, they surged all their available planes in anticipation of the invasion’s approaching 0217 scheduled start.
Just before the start time in order to have the maximum amount of fuel on board, three more AWACS, one of them a new Russian model, a Mainstay Super, and hundreds of fighters and ground attack planes began lifting off from the Warsaw Pact bases that were still at least partially operational.
Within minutes the Green Giants were again locked on to Russian fighters whose controllers once again don’t even know the Green Giants are coming. And once again they fire their sidewinders and cannons with devastating effect. Then Owens and Green Giants two, three, and four, were sent after one of the Russian AWACS; the others were vectored back for another pass through the uncontrolled mass of Russian fighters milling about in the night sky.
The only difference being that this time most of the Green Giants were vectored north instead of east; and this time the Russian AWACS blew up in a great ball of fire.
And then once again, for the second time tonight, NATO F-16s and Tornados begin hitting all the Warsaw Pact airfields they can reach squawking Russian identifiers.
****** CPO John T. Cassidy
The helicopter carrying Chief Petty Officer John T. “Hoppy” Cassidy of the United States Coast Guard and his seven man team to the Elbe dipped up and down as it followed the terrain to an entry point about ten miles east of the double tracked railroad bridge which crosses the river on the outskirts of Pirna.
Cassidy’s eyes were closed and he was pretending to sleep, but his mind was going a mile a minute as his thoughts oscillate back and forth between the various things that might go wrong and his wife and five children. Oh dear Jesus, I’ll do anything. Just get me out this alive.
Unarmed coast guard rescue swimmers are the strongest of all the swimmers in the NATO inventory and are assigned to the most demanding underwater targets; weapons-carrying Marine swimmers are assigned to the bridges where it might be necessary to come out of the water and fight their way ashore to plant their charges.
Cassidy and his team, already wearing their black rubber survival suits and tethered to their floating explosive cases, leapt out of their hovering helicopter and into the deserted stretch of river at about twenty minutes after midnight. The chopper quickly swung away as the last man splashed into the Elbe and used the metal clip at the end of his nylon cord to link himself and the explosives he would be towing to the other members of his team.
Two hours later, and still clipped together, Cassidy and his swimmers silently passed through downtown Pirna until they reached the railroad bridge for the main east-west rail line through the Czech Republic. When Cassidy gave the signal of three sharp jerks on the team line, each man immediately unclipped himself from Cassidy’s control line and began working by touch in the pitch black water to attach his explosives to one of the bridge’s eight support columns.
The carefully timed charges won’t go off for whichever is longer—four hours or 0510 in the morning. That is more than enough of a time lag, the mission planners thought, for the men to swim downstream and be picked up by their helicopter at the rendezvous point, the north end of a small sandy island where the river temporary divides into two channels. Satellite photos showed it to be unused and unpopulated.
The American air force Huey which delivered Cassidy and his men is also tasked to pick them up. So its crew landed it in an isolated rural area away from the river and then, after tense hours of waiting in the dark, took off and approached the sandy island in the last hour of darkness. The low level return trip to West Germany in early daylight is likely, so the planners say, to be more dangerous than the insertion.
At 0510, just as their explosive packages went off, the helicopter pilot reported picking them up. It was never heard from again
****** Feldwebel Thomas Schulter
The German version of the American C-130 carrying Thomas Schulter and the two German combat engineers on his three man team, and their two pallets, flew all night and on into daylight as it headed east. Schulter’s team is the third of the four teams the plane is to drop. After the fourth team is dropped the German C-130 will, its pilots devoutly pray, be refueled by one of the three KC-135 aerial tankers operated by the German air force and begin its long trip home.
If the pilots make it home, their plane will be serviced and reloaded while they sleep. Then they will go again the next evening with more teams. This time the teams will be British SAS going into the Russian forests on the border with Poland.
Truth be told, Schulter is big and strong and a bit of a bully. Perhaps that’s why the commander of his Fernspaher Kompanie, one of the Bundeswehr’s three elite long distance reconnaissance and sabotage Kompanies, promoted him to sergeant and put him in charge of the two airborne engineers who are accompanying him. Whatever the reason, Schulter is now many hundreds of miles into Russia and on his own without anyone to tell him what to do.
It wasn’t until the cargo door began to open and the big FSK sergeant and his two engineers solemnly shook hands with the first team to jump did the true enormity of what they are about to try to do sink in. If they survive they will, in all likelihood, be in Russia until the end of the war. And probably forever Schulter thought morbidly. The Ivans will never let us leave.
Schulter and his men stood stoically as the plane tilted its nose upwards and the first two pallets slid out the open door with the three men accompanying them. But their minds were churning. I should have stayed in the infantry, was Schulter’s only thought as he watched the men and pallets disappear into the blackness of the night.
Less than half an hour later it was the turn of Schulter’s team. For the third time that night the low flying plane tilted up its nose and pallets slid out. This time it was Schulter and his men who went out with them. It was raining and Schulter promptly lost sight of his engineers and the pallets. This rain is not a heavy burden. It is good. No one will see us land.
****** Marshal Aleksander Ivanov
Just the reverse of NATO’s highly orchestrated response was happening at the Warsaw Pact’s war headquarters deep in the basement of a hotel near Magdeburg in East Germany. The senior officers, all Russians, had access to the various satellite-delivered American and European TV channels on their little East German sets. They were dumbfounded when their artillery began firing.
“What happened? … “What is happening?” screamed Marshal Aleksander Ivanov, the stocky 68yo invasion commander who had been wounded in the Great Patriotic War when he was a young captain.
“Stop them. Order them to wait.”
It couldn’t be stopped and trying to do so caused even more confusion. Within minutes NSA began listening to the contact reports pouring into Ivanov’s headquarters as the Warsaw Pact units, those who could, began reporting the devastating effects of the massive NATO response to the Warsaw Pact artillery barrage.
The NATO response was devastating, both in the air and on the ground. Almost four hundred and fifty Russian-made planes were shot down in the first few minutes of the initial air battle and another ninety or more were destroyed on the ground, with a loss of only forty-three NATO planes and seven helicopters.
But that was only part of it. The NATO planes which attacked the East German and Czech airfields while squawking the Warsaw Pact’s aircraft identification frequencies had a devastating secondary impact on the Russian-made planes that escaped the initial onslaught.
As a result of NATO’s initial attack, the missile systems guarding the Warsaw Pact airfields, now thoroughly aroused, began launching at everything that moved even if they were squawking as Warsaw Pact planes. The result was another one hundred and eighty or so of the Russian-made planes—almost all those still in the air that survived the lopsided initial air battle go down as they approach their own airfields to land and refuel.
It was a catastrophe. Almost all the Warsaw Pact planes in the air when the Russian artillery began firing were destroyed before the war was even scheduled to begin.
A similar catastrophe occurs among the Warsaw Pact ground forces. As ordered, they maintained fire discipline and waited for the official start time—while NATO pummeled them for more than four hours with every NATO ground attack plane, helicopter, and artillery tube that could reach a Warsaw Pact target.
Almost all of the Russian artillery batteries that fired the initial retaliation salvos to start the war and many other units are inundated and destroyed by NATO’s radar guided counter-battery fire, and so are many of the Warsaw Pact’s headquarters and the troop concentrations.
******
The Russian and other Warsaw Pact units finally commenced their attack at 0217 as scheduled. It was a bad start. Some units never even began their attacks because the headquarters tasked to confirm the order had been destroyed. And many of those that do attack on schedule are decimated when they begin to advance and the promised artillery and close air support does not arrive.
What arrived instead of the promised air support are hordes of quickly refueled NATO attack helicopters and ground support planes such as the American F-16s and German and British Tornados. They had a devastating effect, particularly the “Warthogs,” the twin engine American A-10s specifically designed to attack troop concentrations and armor.
Even so, and despite all its initial setbacks, the Warsaw Pact’s invasion force advanced; it may have taken some unexpected hard hits but it was still powerful. As NATO’s planners had always expected, it was initially concentrated on both of the two Fulda Pass routes leading into the heart of West Germany.
NATO’s troops and tanks, and especially the highly motivated and well equipped Germans in the Fulda Pass, give ground grudgingly. They were defending their homes and families with ferocity and dogged determination. The West Germans’ armor and handheld antitank weapons inflicted fearsome losses on the invaders, but they advanced.
In the bowels of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion headquarters the staff became increasingly aware of their heavy losses and the ferocity of the defense as the invasion proceeded in the early morning darkness. But their units were in West Germany and pressing forward, and the enormity and implications of their massive air and submarine losses were not yet fully known or appreciated.
Reports of Russian and East German units moving over the border lifted some of the anxiety and confusion at the Warsaw Pact headquarters as the night wore on. But everything changed again a little after five in the morning. That’s when the first reports begin coming in that suggested a number of key railroad and highway bridges in East Germany, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have been destroyed or seriously damaged.
Russia’s staff officers were professionals, and the East Germans even more so. They understood the importance of the bridges and the significance of losing them; but once again the reports were incomplete and their implications and size of the losses were not yet fully appreciated.
Initially Marshal Ivanov and the officers at the Warsaw Pact headquarters in Magdeburg believed that, as they had expected, NATO aircraft attacked the damaged and destroyed bridges and they eagerly waited for the follow up reports detailing the NATO air losses that were the trade-off for the lost bridges. By seven in the morning it is clear the damage is considerable and that NATO planes were not involved.
I already knew from our own operation reports and NSA intercepts that 63 of the targeted bridges, including six on the Polish border, had been either totally destroyed or so seriously damaged they won’t be usable for some time. The other nine key bridges are fully functional either because our demolition teams never reached them or were intercepted and destroyed. Sixty-one of the Marine and Coast Guard swimming teams returned; eleven did not.
All nine of the Warsaw Pact bridges that were still operational will be hit again tonight along with five additional bridges from the alternatives list.
****** General Roberts
We are not the only ones engaged in special operations.
Russian and East German Spetsnaz teams apparently infiltrated into West Germany before the war began. They struck at 0217 after receiving their “proceed” orders as phone calls on the bulky West German cell phones each carried. They also heard the song which ordered them to “proceed” on the little handheld FM radios each team carried as a backup.
One of the Russian teams hit the “secret” NATO headquarters at Kafertal in the cellar of one of the 510th Tank Battalion’s barracks—where NATO’s war-time headquarters and I would have been located if I had followed NATO’s twenty-five year old plans and the advice of the headquarters’ security team.
It was a successful attack, at least in the sense that the Spetsnaz quickly took the tank battalion’s barracks and the intended headquarters in its basement. Taking them was easy because the barracks and headquarters under it are empty and undefended. NATO’s headquarters had never arrived and the 510th, known to one and all since its formation during WWII as the “Nickel-Dime,” had deployed days earlier to its initial invasion-fighting positions; my headquarters is in the basement of an old office building in Weinheim.
A similar Spetsnaz attack on the American Army’s headquarters at Vaihingen also failed, but only after an intense firefight that raged for hours throughout the early morning hours in the darkened halls and offices of the peacetime headquarters. It really tore up the building but had little, if any, impact on our fighting ability—the headquarters staff and I had dispersed to our field positions days earlier.
Chapter Six
Round one of the heavyweight title fight ended as the sun came up on the first morning of the war. And everyone in the world knew who had won it.
One reason they know is because one of the American television networks somehow got a reporter into one of our fighter bases last night and she was able to interview some of the returning pilots.
“I’m standing here at an American airbase, in a location I cannot mention, watching an incredible, and I mean incredible, scene of rapidly arriving and departing American and West German fighter planes.”
“With me is an American pilot, Major Jesse Parker of Portland, Oregon who just landed. Major Parker, how’s it going?
“Great. Wow. It’s been a turkey shoot. This is my second mission of the night. I got two Russian SU-27s on the first one and another SU-27 and an MiG-29 this time. A lot of the guys have done even better.”
“So things are really going well?”
“It’s going a lot better than that. The war’s over and we won. The Russians and East Germans just don’t know it yet.”
“How soon will you be going up again, Major Parker?”
“Probably one more time tonight, and then I have to take a mandatory rest period.”
“Thank you, Major Parker. And good luck. This is Samantha Eggars for CBS News at an American fighter base somewhere in Germany.”
******
My headquarters’ morning briefing began at 0600. All of the deputy commanders and the Marine Commandant were in attendance either in person or via a teleconference over landlines from their various headquarters. Otto Klausen and the Marine Commandant, Pug Murphy, were the only ones actually with me at Weinheim. The gist of the briefing was that things were looking far better than we could have possibly hoped.
