When the American Bradley reached the bridge, the German captain, who had been watching its progress, turned to the American major. "Ah, if you would excuse me, Major. My position is no longer tenable. I must withdraw my unit to its next blocking position, which is seven point two kilometers further down the road."
"That is all right, Captain. I understand. Auf Wiedersehen."
Saluting, the captain also bid the American major farewell and returned to his unit.
Just short of the road junction west of Ronshausen, Major Harold Cerro saw a lone humvee half concealed in a stand of trees with two figures standing next to it waiting. Knowing one of the figures had to be his boss, Colonel Scott Dixon, Cerro ordered his driver to pull over next to it and stop.
Normally, when responding to a summons by his commander to meet at some isolated spot in the middle of the night, Cerro would literally jump out of whatever vehicle he was traveling in before it stopped and bound over to Dixon to receive the latest order or change of mission Dixon invariably had for him. Dixon and Cerro, having worked so long together, understood each other's work habits to the point where they could hold short, almost encrypted, conversations without any loss of clarity or meaning. Tonight, for example, when Dixon called the brigade command post and directed that Cerro meet him at a crossroads near the command post of the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, Cerro knew that Dixon had an important order that needed to be issued and there wasn't time for him to return to the command post himself.
Cerro, however, didn't leap out of his humvee when it stopped. Instead, he sat there for a moment almost as if he had to think about what to do next. Slowly Cerro had to gather the strength necessary to climb out of his vehicle. For Cerro, like everyone else in the brigade, from the youngest rifleman to Dixon himself, was pushing the limits of endurance. The Battle of Central Germany, now officially declared over by the American news media, had cost more than lives and materiel lost. Everyone, American and German, who had participated in the grueling slugfest was exhausted. And the exhaustion was not only physical. It was mental as well. Fear, stress, wild swings that took a person from near comatose exhaustion to the heights of sheer terror where they couldn't even control their bodily functions, tore away at the mental fiber of the mind and soul just as heavy labor tore at the cells of one's muscles. War, as von Clausewitz so correctly pointed out, was as much a contest of wills and minds as it was physical.
As he mustered the strength to move himself over to where the two colonels waited, Cerro looked at them. They were quite a contrast. Colonel Vorishnov was the storybook image of a Russian officer. He was big for an armor officer. The Russian Army still recruited only short officers and men so that their tank designers could create combat vehicles that had a lower silhouette. Unlike many of his peers, however, Vorishnov was not thick in the waist, though the heavy parka he wore made him appear to be quite pregnant. Dixon, a man of average height, seemed dwarfed by the tall Russian. The two had used their physical difference before the Battle of Central Germany for comic relief. Every now and then when he judged the mood to be right, Vorishnov would come up to Dixon as he was slouched over a map or document. Standing between Dixon and the light, so that the American colonel stood in the shadow of the tall Russian, Vorishnov would stretch his large frame out and up as far as it would go. When Dixon noticed the shadow of the tall Russian over him, he would stop what he was doing, look up, and with a look of terror on his face exclaim, "My God, they are ten feet tall." In response, Vorishnov would reach out with his hand, fingers upturned and spread out as if they were holding a ball. Bellowing so that his voice sounded like it came from the depths of a monstrous cavern, Vorishnov would say, "If we had known you were so puny, we would have crushed you a long time ago." In the past, such antics had never failed to bring a round of laughter from the staff of the 1st Brigade.
Sitting there, Cerro realized that those days were gone. The war had taken its toll. There was no humor anymore. There was no lighter side to look at. Even worse, after assessing the results of their recent battles, Cerro even wondered if there was hope. For as they sat there that night, there was no indication that the will of the German soldier to fight had in any way been diminished during the last battle. Fuel reserves within the Tenth Corps were almost nonexistent, casualties in some companies reached as high as 50 percent, equipment that had been damaged and could not be hastily repaired had been destroyed in place by their crews, the heavy freeze that had made the ground hard and easy to maneuver on was coming to an end. And they were only halfway to the coast with few surprises left up their sleeves. With such solemn thoughts as a backdrop, Cerro slowly unfolded his weary body from the front seat of his humvee and trudged over to where Dixon and Vorishnov waited.
There were no greetings, no pleasantries. Not even a grunt to acknowledge Cerro's appearance. There was only Dixon's announcement, made matter-of-factly. "Hal, you're to assume command of the 3rd of the 3rd. Jim Jensen, who's been filling in since their XO was wounded, will report immediately to brigade for reassignment." There was a pause before Dixon added, "You know the situation and the battalion's mission. I have no need to tell you how important it is that you keep the Germans at bay. We can't afford another incident like the one last night with the engineer company and the field hospital. We were lucky, you know. There was a supply convoy less than two kilometers down the road with a dozen tankers filled with diesel sitting on the side of the road. Had we lost them instead of the hospital, we'd have been in real trouble."
Neither Cerro nor Vorishnov, who was listening and watching, found any fault with what Dixon had said. They agreed that it would have been far worse if the fuel convoy had been lost. It was not that they had in a matter of a few days become unfeeling and inhuman monsters. All three knew what the 553rd Field Hospital incident had meant in human terms to the soldiers and patients of that unit. But there was no energy left at that moment in their exhausted minds, overtasked with the needs of dealing with the imperatives of the moment, to lament the dead and wounded of the 553rd. That action was over, completed. What was critical now was to get their brigade moving to the sea. The war had not stopped. The killing was not over. The next twenty-four hours would be critical. The commander of the Tenth Corps, Big Al, hoped to pull away from the last of the corps' battle against the 2nd and 10th Panzer divisions and posture the corps for the forthcoming battle with the 1st and 7th Panzers, now forming what was being called the Hannover line. It was believed that once this line had been broken, there would be no stopping them from reaching the sea.
To that end, Dixon assessed the effectiveness of his brigade, determined which units were still capable of offensive action and which were good only for defense, and positioned them in his line of march accordingly. The 3rd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, which had performed well and was still, on paper, a powerful battalion, had lost two commanders in less than six hours. That, coupled with a series of quick but brutal encounters with the 2nd Panzer, had left the leadership and troops of the battalion unsettled. After a quick conference with Major Jensen, Dixon had determined that Jensen was not capable of rallying the troops of the battalion and executing the rear-guard actions that Dixon had assigned it. Rear-guard operations, high risk under the best of circumstances, required a commander to have sound judgment, a will of steel, and, as Cerro himself had once said during a training exercise, "a commander with a set of brass nuts."