The choices for Alex Stern boiled down to two whens and a where. One Bradley battalion remained uncommitted, and he waited for the right moment — the first when—to send it either along the west or the east side of the bowl. It was the choice of where that troubled him. If they attacked through the hills in the west, they could relieve the pressure building up against his lead elements and ensure the safety of his antitank blocking force. Such a move would be simple, direct, and straight to the heart of the matter. Feeling the self-confidence that comes with making decisions and believing in them, Stern liked that choice. If he ordered the force along the bowl’s eastern hills, however, the move would take longer to have an effect. The reports indicated the enemy was weaker there, throwing himself against a company set in a good reverse-slope position, and the maneuver offered the possibility of an end run against the Germans.
“How’s it goin’, Sir?” Eads asked over the intercom.
“What do you think? You’ve heard all the reports coming in.”
“Hey, Sir, I ain’t nothin’ but a track driver. All that strategy stuff’s way over my head. Could you maybe give me, you know, the Reader s Digest condensed version?”
Stern thought for a second. “Well, they bulled right into the battalion in the woods and tried to overpower it, but we’re holding them off.”
“Just tried to put their heads down and drive straight up the middle, huh, Sir?”
“Something like that, Eads.”
“Humph. No style at all. Worse than my high school football team. Did I ever tell you about that team, Sir? Up the middle, up the middle, up the middle, punt. You know, Sir, when we played Ellenville High for the county championships, their defense had the four biggest guys in the middle you ever saw, but their outside line had more holes than, than…”
“Swiss cheese?”
“Mebbe. Anyway, ol’ coach he just kept going up the middle. And y’know what?”
Stern was shaking his head at the wisdom of a farm boy as he reached for his command net. “You lost?”
“Howdja guess, Sir?” came Eads’s surprised voice.
“I had a feeling. Eads, you know more about tactics and strategy than you give yourself credit for.” He keyed the microphone on his command net, then ordered his reserve battalion to leave its attack position behind Sintzen and sweep around to the east. Another message told the battalion already in the hills around the bowl to hold on. Aggressiveness, thought Stern, is not enough. You have to go forward, but you have to look where you’re going.
As nervous as he was about going into the attack, the order to move forward, pass through the 1-89th Infantry, and attack to encircle the enemy relieved some of the growing tension in 1st Lt. Billy Travers and the rest of TF 3-29. All morning they’d eaten the l-89th’s dust as they followed it down the autobahn. Then they’d stopped and started, again and again, as the forward task force dueled with the Germans. The on-again, off-again war of the follow-on mission was beginning to wear on Travers’s nerves.
Never straying more than a few steps from his radio, he brought the leadership of his platoon together during each halt, trying to form a team from the mixed bag he’d been given. The 2d Platoon, C Company, 3-29th Infantry, once again had three squads; they had made up for the loss of Two-Three by attaching one of two surviving squads from 3d Platoon, which had lost both its platoon leader and a Bradley during the air attack.
During each of the short halts, Travers and his sergeants had talked over platoon battle drills, walking through who would assault, who would support, and where each squad fit into the plan. His platoon sergeant had kept busy redistributing and cross-leveling ammunition, checking maintenance, and getting the names, social security numbers, and the next of kin of the new arrivals.
Because the l-89th’s scouts were screening to the front of the two task forces, the scouts for Travers’s battalion focused on taking the actions necessary to make the eventual forward passage as smooth as it could be. One section deployed behind the l-89th’s embattled companies in the west, the other fell in behind Walker’s Bradleys in the east. Between the play-by-play of the forward scout sections and the processed situation reports sent by the scout platoon leader, who’d stationed himself at the l-89th’s TOC, information flowed freely into TF 3-29. As Travers rolled forward, the lead platoon in the second company, he had a clear idea of both the big picture and the terrain and enemy that lay before him.
Bill Walker, however, saw only three things clearly. First, he was in command of a company in the middle of a firefight. Second, once again he found himself outnumbered and outgunned right in the middle of the one route leading toward the Germans’ objective. And third, his soldiers, prone in the brush, behind trees, and in the folds of the reverse slope, were beating back every assault that crested the ridge in front of them — but the assaults just kept coming.
Having scored the night before with the Cav’s mortars, Walker told his fire support officer to forget about artillery and get the four-deuces on target. It was just as well. The two companies taking a beating in the west had priority of indirect fires. The companies’ requests for missions were backed up so far that, had the artillery battalion been able to fire them all, it would have taken a week’s worth of shooting and several truckloads of ammunition. To the knowing nods of the battalion’s mortarmen and to Walker’s advantage, the artillery FOs once again neglected their handiest, most responsive asset. Walker took full advantage of their oversight.
Walker’s company would hold its fire until the Germans crested the ridge, letting them advance a hundred meters or so unmolested. Then Walker would bring in the mortar fire, effectively sealing off those Germans in front of him from their counterparts on the far side. As the Germans dashed forward to get out from under the shell fire, they ran into the buzzsaw of Walker’s infantry. Three times the assault waves came, and three times Macintosh, Baldwin, and the rest of the company held their breath and their fire until the Germans were just outside hand-grenade range. Twice the enemy tried to work around the flanks of the hill, but — just as he had on the previous night — Walker pulled his Bradleys back and posted them on the sides of his position. Four Bradleys were on one side; four were on the other; and a platoon’s worth served as a mobile “fire brigade.” The Bradleys dashed first to the left flank, then to the right, adding their autocannon and coaxial machine-gun fires to that of the flank guard, thus blocking the Germans’ end runs.
Yet even as Walker’s men pulled ammunition from the wounded and crawled forward to strip grenades from fallen Germans, Walker knew the clock was working against him. He’d long since banned automatic fire, and save for his machine gunners, his soldiers reverted to the “hold ’em and squeeze ’em” single shots of the rifle range.
The drop in the volume of fire gave the few Germans who’d crept in between the curtain of high explosive and grazing machine-gun fire the openings they needed to infiltrate the company position. Walker saw a group of three go to ground not forty meters from his command post. In less than a minute, the newly appointed company commander found himself, his fire support officer (FSO), and their radiotelephone operators (RTOs) pinned down, trading shots with the little group of enemy. The little battle went on for several minutes until the FSO’s M113 crew, their vehicle parked about seventy meters away, decided to join in. The APC rolled toward the enemy, the vehicle commander walking .50-caliber rounds up the hill toward the infiltrators. A German knelt to bring his antitank weapon to bear, and Walker cut him down. The other two panicked. As they rolled out of the way of the charging track, they rolled right into the command groups’ sights. Walker’s RTO felled them both with his last two bullets.