If all went well, the six divisions in II and III Corps would easily punch a hole through the two Polish mechanized divisions they faced. But to what end?
He put the question into words. “And our strategic objective?”
“To ‘punish’ the Polish armed forces.” Bremer shrugged. “Whatever the devil that means.”
Von Seelow didn’t like the sound of that at all. Without a clear military or political goal, they could easily wind up flailing wildly about inside Poland, wasting precious strength and time pursuing an elusive victory nobody could define.
Bremer saw his uncertainty and nodded. “I don’t like it much, either. But at least our part in all this is clear enough.” He smiled thinly. “So now we try putting this wild-eyed scheme of yours into practice, Willi.”
Army-level plans like Summer Lightning laid out only the broad outlines of a campaign. Operations officers like von Seelow were responsible for crafting the detailed brigade-, division-, and corps-level plans needed to implement their superiors’ grand schemes. II Corps’ current ops plan was largely based on concepts he had evolved during staff exercises earlier in the year.
The knowledge that his bold ideas were about to be tested under fire stirred contradictory emotions. As a soldier, he felt proud that his abilities were finally being recognized by his comrades and by his superiors. At the same time, he couldn’t shake a nagging belief that this war was fundamentally unjust. He’d read and heard enough unfiltered news to know the kinds of pressure the French and many Germans had been applying against Poland and the other small countries in Eastern Europe.
Bremer must have been thinking along somewhat the same lines. “At least we have one consolation. We are soldiers, not politicians. We need only do our duty and let the vote-buyers sort out the rest, eh?”
But Willi von Seelow was not so sure of that. The professional soldiers who had served the Third Reich had also held firm to their duty. They had been wrong. Duty must always be measured against the demands of individual conscience, he thought. Ultimately all soldiers, especially those in command positions, are called on to decide whether or not they are fighting a just or an unjust war.
His superiors, both in the army and in the government, were entitled to the presumption that their decisions met those tests, but he couldn’t help feeling uneasy. The Chancellor’s declaration of martial law had seemed a necessary, though harsh emergency measure at first. As the months passed, though, Willi couldn’t help noticing that laws and methods of governing enacted as temporary seemed increasingly regarded as permanent. That worried him. As a young officer, he’d served one dictatorship, however unwillingly. He did not want to serve another.
Two hours later, the 19th Panzergrenadier Brigade was on the road, a long, blacked-out column of tanks and APCs slowly clanking east toward the border town of Forst. Their route took them through tiny, run-down villages and patches of dead or dying forest. The vast, open-pit brown coal mines that pockmarked the surrounding countryside had wreaked havoc on the local environment.
Other tank and mechanized infantry units filled the roads behind them, funneling into Cottbus in columns that stretched for kilometer after kilometer. Most of EurCon’s II Corps was massing near the city, preparing for the lunge into Poland after a chosen few cleared the way.
It was daybreak.
Although the woods on the Polish side of the Neisse River were still cloaked in shadow, the sun had already climbed above the horizon — a ball of fire rising in a cloudless sky. Red-tinged sunlight touched the rusting steel girders of the Forst railroad bridge and set them aglow. Light winds from the south and southeast promised warm and dry weather later in the day.
Men in camouflage-pattern fatigues, combat engineers, swarmed over the railroad bridge, laying wood planking across its tracks and ties so that armored vehicles could use it safely. Other engineers, attached to the brigade by the 7th Panzer Division and II Corps, were busy deploying two ribbon bridges across the Neisse. They worked as fast as their self-propelled pontoon sections arrived and splashed into the water, bolting them together to form floating roadways reaching across the river.
Clusters of armored vehicles dotted an open park just west of the bridging site. Gepard flakpanzers mounting radar-directed, 35mm guns were on watch in case the Polish Air Force made an unwelcome appearance over Forst. Longer-range Roland SAM batteries stood guard further back, outside the town.
In the narrow streets of Forst itself, the 19th Panzergrenadier’s Marder APCs and Leopard tanks were lined up nose-to-tail, waiting to cross into Poland. Infantrymen wearing helmets and camouflage battle dress lay curled up beside their Marders. They were making use of the delay by trying to catch up on some of the sleep they’d lost during the previous night. Tank crewmen wearing olive-drab fatigues and black berets stood on top of their vehicles, using binoculars to scan the silent, wooded enemy shore.
Several staff officers and NCOs chatted together near an American-made M577 command vehicle parked in a street overlooking the railway bridge. The boxy tracked vehicle served as the brigade’s TOC, its tactical operations center. Bent low to clear the M577’s low roof, von Seelow walked down the rear ramp and joined his subordinates. He stood blinking in sunshine that was painfully bright after a night spent cooped up inside the TOC’s map- and radio-filled compartment.
“Any news, sir?”
Von Seelow nodded. “Major Hauser assures me that his bridges will be completed on schedule, and that we’ll be crossing in half an hour. Since he is a punctual and punctilious man, I think we can count on his assurances.”
His mild jest drew a laugh from those in earshot. A louder and longer laugh than it deserved, he noticed. Beneath their carefully assumed nonchalance, these young men were all nerves, frightened by the very real prospect of killing or being killed. No amount of riot control duty or street patrolling could compare with the sheer frightfulness of modern war.
Von Seelow knew he should be feeling the same grating anxieties. Certainly he’d been scared enough under fire in the Balkans — caught between the warring Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. For some reason, though, this was different. He was still conscious of being afraid of death or failure, but his fears were buried deeper than he remembered them. Maybe it was because he had more control over events now than he’d had as a junior officer obeying other men’s orders. Maybe he was just too busy.
Movement near the far end of the railway bridge caught his eye. With their hands held high in surrender, a steady trickle of disconsolate Polish infantrymen in their distinctive “worm” camouflage-pattern field uniforms came walking across, prodded at riflepoint by German soldiers whose faces and hands were daubed black.
The Poles had been captured during the first and most dangerous phase of this river crossing. Crammed into flimsy rubber rafts, an infantry company from the 7th Panzer’s reconnaissance battalion had paddled silently across the Neisse before dawn. Once ashore, they’d overwhelmed a tiny Polish garrison posted in the little village of Zasieki to keep an eye on the railroad bridge. Together with a light infantry company from one of the division’s Jaeger battalions, the recon troops were now spread in a semicircle through the woods, guarding the bridgehead until the brigade’s heavy tanks and vehicles could relieve them.
Willi had bet that this crossing point would be only weakly garrisoned, and he had won his bet. With just four divisions deployed along a border nearly four hundred kilometers long, the Poles were too thin on the ground to defend everywhere at once. In this sector, they’d concentrated their troops opposite the highway bridge at Olszyna, ten kilometers south. A German assault at Zasieki, with only a rudimentary road net and surrounded by forest, must not have seemed a significant threat.