Soldiers and Marines Saga, page 51
However it happened, the reality is that the bridge over the Weser at Hamelin is still in Legion hands and they refuse to retreat. This has forced the East Germans to use a bridge over the Weser further north in order to advance. They’ve left it to the Russians to deal with the Legion.
Early this morning, in obedience with the orders they received, the Russian Nineteenth Guards Division and most of the Twenty-second Guards launch a major combined arms offensive aimed at the three Legion battalions in front of Hamelin on the eastern side of the Weser. They are the last NATO troops east of the Weser and Ivanov wants them gone. The Guards were ordered to advance and destroy the French with the assistance of artillery, attack aircraft, and assault helicopters.
All three of the Legion battalions opposing the Russian Guards are infantry battalions armed with SAMs, mortars, a few light armored vehicles, and lots of highly experienced forward air controllers and anti-tank shooters. There are just under a twelve hundred veterans of what many consider to be the world’s finest professional soldiers. And they are armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight.
Why are they spoiling for a fight? Because many of them, perhaps even a majority, are political refugees. They hate the communists and found a home in the Legion after fleeing Eastern Europe and the Russians.
The Legionaires know they face Russians and grin at each other in anticipation as the Russian artillery rounds begin to fall. They are dug in deeply such that only a direct hit will take them out. There were only a few direct hits before the Russian artillery stopped and the two Russian Guards divisions, almost all eighteen and nineteen year old conscripts, closed with the Legionaires for their first combat experience.
Unfortunately for the Russian Guards, their scheduled air support did not show up. The SU-27s never got close to Hamelin and the four companies of East German helicopter gunships tasked to support them dissolved with the appearance of an entire squadron of West German Eurofighter Typhoons.
The Typhoons aren’t the greatest fighter planes in the world but they were more than capable of proving once again that assault helicopters are no match for fighters in air to air combat. They quickly destroyed the Russian assault helicopters because the Russian SU-27s tasked to protect and assist them were themselves jumped and scattered by Canadian F-16s and British Typhoons before they could get anywhere near the battlefield.
As a result, only the Guards’ own artillery and tanks, mostly older T-62s but some T-72s, supported the Russian infantry as they attacked the supposedly unsupported and helpless French. The Russian assault arrived in two great waves of attackers with the second wave a couple of hundred yards behind the first. It is a classic infantry mass attack. It looked like a scene out of a World War One newsreel.
******
According to Buster Jones's inspection officer on the scene, a Major Hooker of the Scots Guards, the Legionnaires waited like wolves watching a large herd of rabbits walk towards them. They held their fire until the first wave of eighteen and nineteen year old Russian conscripts and their tanks gets real close, less than fifty yards. Then they rose up and began slaughtering them with a hurricane of small arms fire, mortars, and anti-tank missiles. Less than a minute later all the Russian tanks in the first wave were destroyed and thousands of the young Guardsmen were dead including many in the second wave.
As you might well imagine, the Russian survivors turned around and ran for lives. But very few escaped because almost instantly the Legionnaires rose from their foxholes in a spontaneous counterattack and began chasing and shooting the retreating Russians.
Thirty minutes later the Legionnaires were more than a mile in front of their old positions; the ground behind them was carpeted with thousands of dead and dying Russians and burning tanks; and several thousand surviving Russians were on their knees clustered in little groups with their hands in the air. The Legionnaires, according to Major Hooker, lost less than seventy dead and about two hundred wounded.
Then the professionalism and discipline of the Legionnaires showed itself once again. They would have cheerfully shot the Russians, but their officers, always the cream of the French officer corps, had ordered them not to and explained why. The Legionnaires are professionals and they understood. They bitched and complained to each other as good soldiers always do, but they obeyed their officers and were secretly proud.
With gestures and pointing and shooing motions the young Russians were made to understand that they should gather up their wounded and go home; their officers and senior NCOs will be transported to a prison camp near Paris.
****** Admiral Mike Morton
Dave Shelton and I were watching anxiously at different airfields as the swimmers boarded the helicopters that will drop them upstream of various pontoon bridges in East Germany and a couple of Austrian railroad bridges outside of Vienna. The photo interpreters at the Detachment had spent the entire day going over last night’s satellite photos. The three pontoon bridges on the Danube that appear to have floodlights on the water or other indications of anti-swimmer defenses are not going to be hit.
Surprisingly, those three are the only bridges that appear to be ready to repel our swimmers. By now the Russians and East Germans almost certainly know that swimmers destroyed the initial permanent bridges—but apparently they must think we won’t come back for their pontoon replacements. Bad mistake.
NATO controls the night skies so it was little wonder that all but one of the forty-two teams of swimmers reached their upstream destinations with ease and slid into the water unnoticed. The one exception was the team in a helicopter that crashed and fell into the water when its rotors hit an unmarked electric line as it descended over the Weser River.
Every single swimmer on the mission had already been on at least one previous assault and many have been on two. And every single one of them had been trained on the use of small magnetic mines against pontoon bridges and how to use their mines if the pontoon boats turn out to be wood or aluminum instead of a metal with magnetic abilities. Even so, all of them were seriously and rightly worried that the Russians know they are coming and will be waiting.
****** Petty Officer Johnny Ray Alpert
No talking was even attempted by men going on the raid against the two of the new pontoon bridges over the Elbe near Dresden. The thunderous racket of their Sikorsky Sea Stallion made it impossible.
The swimmers sat silent and unmoving as the Sea Stallion rises and falls as it follows the terrain. Several of the four man Coast Guard team dozed and one of the guys, Dick Riordan, spent the entire ninety-five minute ride fingering rosary beads with his eyes shut and his lips moving. Hope they don’t know we’re coming is the thought in every man’s mind. No one says a word.
Nineteen year old Petty Officer Johnny Ray Alpert was the sixth man out the door—and he got a mouthful of water when he jumped from the Sea Stallion with his canvas bag and its sixty-eight two-pound shaped charges. He went in the river just fine but was shocked and surprised when his feet instantly hit bottom about six feet down. As he surfaced, he spit out his breathing tube and opens his mouth to say something softly to the men around him. The splashed of water next to him as Chief Petty Officer Riordan jumped in next to him scored a perfect bulls eye – right into his mouth.
After a serious and involuntary bout of coughing and wheezing to get the water out of his lungs, which lasts about five seconds and seems to everyone, including him, that it lasted five minutes and could be heard for miles, he saw the heads of his three teammates in the vague moonlight and joined the tether line tied to Herndon’s waist.
Not a word was spoken but Johnny Ray could feel the team’s silent disapproval as Riordan led them down the river.
Damn, Riordan’s really pissed. Hope he doesn’t report me. I just got these stripes. Christ, I don’t even know why I spit out the mouthpiece.
The swim down the river with the current took the men over three hours, just as it did last time. The only difficult part was working their way around the collapsed bridge without surfacing in case anyone is working to repair it. What makes it particularly difficult is that every member of the team is sorely tempted to secretly poke his head up so he can admire his handiwork from four nights ago when they took down the big railroad bridge that the pontoon bridge is replacing.
Chief Riordan led them close to the shore on the undamaged side of the railroad bridge. They all made it past without snagging their black wet suits on the rough metal edges protruding from the scattered debris.
About fifteen minutes after they clear the damaged bridge Riordan gave the three hard jerks that, repeated down the line from one swimmer to the next, signaled his intent to carefully, very carefully, surface and look while the men maintain their positions underwater. Moments later he gave the two hard jerks followed by three hard jerks that told them it was okay to quietly surface and take an orientation look for themselves.
In the distant darkness, almost half a mile further downstream Johnny Ray and his teammates could see the flickering lights of vehicles crossing the first of the two side-by-side pontoon bridges. But thank you Jesus the bridges themselves and the water around them are not lit.
Apparently the Russians or whoever is up there fear attracting an aerial attack more than anything else. That is, after all, what they have been given weapons and training to fight off.
Johnny Ray and the Chief were assigned to the first pontoon bridge; the other two men on the team will hit the second virtually identical bridge about fifty yards downstream.
The Chief angled the team towards the center of the first bridge and then, at his signal jerk of four sharp pulls, which they have been expecting for what seemed like ages, they all stopped swimming and let the current carry them downstream in the pitch black darkness. They held their hands in front of them as they’ve been taught, one hand forward and down and one hand up and out.
Each swimmer found the first bridge by the tried and true method of floating along with the current just under the surface until he bumped into it. As soon as they got under the pontoon boats of the first bridge each of them experiences a wave of relief when he could not see the vehicles passing on the bridge above.
Not being able to see the vehicles on the bridge was important. It meant the bridge is solid in the sense that swimmers working under the bridge cannot be seen through gaps and metal mesh in the roadbed the floating pontoon boats are holding up.
Without a moment’s hesitation Alpert and the Chief split up and begin attaching their two-pound shaped charges to the pontoons of the first bridge while the other two men slipped quietly on downstream to work on the second bridge.
Attaching the mines to the pontoon boats is easier said than done even when the boats are made of steel as these are—because the pontoon boats constantly move up and down in the water as the weight of each slowly passing vehicle weighs down upon them.
It was a difficult process—operating strictly by touch in the dark water the Chief and his swimmers have to take an explosive charge out of their bag, affix it to a boat, throw the little timer switch, and then move cautiously on to the next pontoon boat and repeat the process.
Despite all the practices the swimmers endured, attaching the charges is not an easy thing to do in the pitch black darkness as the moving water continually tries to push them downriver. Each man must reach in his mine bag and grab a mine, strip off the protective tape from its extremely sticky surface, push it up against the bottom of the pontoon and hold it there for a few seconds until it solidifies enough to be firmly stuck. Then he holds down the safety catch while he flips the little lever that arms the mine so it will explode exactly 180 minutes later. Then he feels his way under the bottom of the boat to the next boat and starts all over again.
Johnny Ray and the Chief started somewhere in the middle of the bridge and moved in opposite directions along the long chain of boats. It took each of them over an hour to mine his portion of the boats. That’s a long time but well under the two hour standard to which they’d been trained. There were only a few charges left in the bottom of their carrying bags when they moved back into the relative safety of the middle of the stream and let the bags sink to the bottom.
Then in the darkness they each swam downstream underwater as fast as possible to their rally point and helicopter pickup. Johnny Ray never arrived. In his after action report the Chief speculated that Johnny Ray swam right past it.
“He was so fast, you know.”
Chapter Twelve
Watering and Jahn returned from blowing the railroad culvert a few hours after dawn. It hadn’t taken them long at all. They had watched the site all afternoon, then moved down to it a couple of hours after dark as soon as the volume of traffic along the road subsided. They used the headlights of approaching trains and vehicles to know when someone was coming.
It only took a couple of minutes to place and connect the two big shaped charges and throw the timer switch. Then they hustled back to camp, first by running along the service road in the moonlit darkness and then, as the first light of dawn appeared, swinging off into the forest and moving north. They were well away when they heard the distant crump of the explosion.
The two engineers moved cautiously into the camp because of its silence. They knew instantly, almost instinctively, that no one was there and that Schulter was gone. A quick search and they knew he had taken the team’s maps and communications equipment and left his weapons, even his knife.
“Er ist ein Kommunist?” Jahn wondered out loud.
“Nein, Schulter is ein druckeberger,” Karl said with disgust. “A coward. I knew it. I thought so from the beginning.”
Jacob doesn’t want to believe it.
“Maybe he goes to the other camp as he suggested?”
But they both know that is not the case—leaving his weapons and taking their maps and radio is more than enough to convince them that he has deserted.
“Ein deserteur. Is it possible?” said Jahn? “Mein Gott, Karl, he will surrender and betray us.”
They instantly knew they’d have to move, and quickly. Their lives depended on it.
What to do first and where to go perplexes them, but only for an instant. To be able to find their camp in the midst of the endless forest, they had selected a spot well away from where a helicopter could possibly land and oriented themselves to its location in terms of a particularly tall tree and a notch in a nearby rocky ridge to the north.
Their gear was cached under an overhanging rock in a ravine. It could not be seen from the air and would be virtually impossible to find unless you knew exactly where it is in relation to the notch in the ridge. Schulter knew.
Wettering and Jahn quickly began to move their supplies and equipment, starting with the two tents and the food and clothing they would most need to survive. Literally running back and forth, and doing their best to leave no tracks, they carried everything due north about three hundred yards towards the notch in the ridge.
Then they started again and moved everything to the left another five hundred yards. And then another move. And then another. And they kept it up until daylight fades and their supplies and equipment were hidden miles away from their original camp.
Finally, when it became too dark to continue and they were totally exhausted, they instantly fall asleep as experienced soldiers always seemed to be able to do.
Well before dawn the next morning they crapped in the moonlit dark, ate a cold breakfast of Toblerone chocolate bars for energy, and pushed off before the first light of day to relocate their second cache of supplies and equipment. They agreed that as soon as their second stash was safely relocated they would return and spend a full day moving everything in the first camp even further south along the ridge until they find a better permanent location.
It took Karl and Jacob all day to reach their second site even though they were only carrying their personal weapons and taking turns carrying the shoulder-fired SAM that had been on the first pallet. They were carrying the SAM because, if they are attacked, it will almost certainly start with being found by a helicopter. They almost didn’t find the second site until Jacob spotted a familiar landmark, a fallen tree that has been split by lightning.
Karl and Jacob worked for two days moving the supplies and equipment from the second pallet to a new location far away from its original hiding place. They didn’t see or hear anything except the normal sounds of the forest and the contrails of a few high flying planes passing far overhead. Over the course of those two days they came to agree to operate from the new second site where they will now have two SAMs and a full load of the explosives.
They also agreed to watch over the original second site from a great distance, and well away from their new stash, just in case Schulter showed up. If he does, of course, they will be greatly embarrassed. And probably court-martialed each of them thinks but does not say.
Schulter showed up the next day. They watched in fascination as a helicopter, it didn’t look military, came in from the direction of their original camp and began circling over the forest in the general area of their original second cache. It was obviously searching for the site and someone in the helicopter obviously knew approximately where it was located.
“Schulter is there, for sure,” said Jahn.
“Ja, only das schweine would know where to look,” said Wettering as he adjusted the SAM he was holding and peered through its sight at the circling helicopter.
“Are you sure it is wise, Karl?”
“Ja, everyone who knows where to look for our two camps is probably on that helicopter. If they cannot talk we are perhaps safe, eh? No one will know where to look,” Wettering said as he raised the SAM and sighted along it. Then he lowered it and waited.
A few minutes later the helicopter turned away from them and Karl quickly aimed the SAM until it made the vibrations and buzzing sound indicating it was reading the heat coming from helicopter’s engine exhaust. The pilot and passengers never saw the missile that killed them.
