Kozak was animated. "The tree line, Wolf. The enemy tank is still in the tree line. Keep your eyes open and be ready to pop him when he sticks his nose out."
Leaning as far into his sight as he could, Wolf watched and waited. Then he saw it. At a range of two thousand meters, the 120mm gun tube of the Leopard tank, even in the Bradley's high-powered sight, looked like a thin pencil line. Still Wolf was able to see it, yelling when he did. "Okay! I got 'im! Here he comes." Depressing the palm switches on the turret controls, Wolf tried to traverse the turret but saw that it didn't move. Immediately, without taking his eye from the sight, he yelled out, "I see the enemy tank, Captain. Let go of your controls!"
In her excitement, Kozak had forgotten that she was still hanging on to her matching set of turret controls. As with a tank, the commander's controls override the gunner's, denying the gunner the ability to traverse the turret or elevate the gun until the commander releases the palm switch on his control. When Wolf yelled, Kozak let go of the turret control as if she had been shocked by an electric current. That, she thought, had been dumb. Really dumb.
With the turret under his control, Wolf watched the gun tube. As soon as the German tank began to appear, Wolf started to track it. He was about to announce the launching of his first TOW missile when, to his surprise and Kozak's, the German tank jerked suddenly, was bathed in a shower of sparks, and then began to spew black smoke.
Leaping up on her seat and sticking her head back up out of the turret, Kozak realized that an American tank in the tree line due north of their position had also been tracking the German tank and been able to get its shot off first. As she peered across the field, a sudden feeling of disappointment swept over her because they had missed a shot, though she didn't stop to think that in truth they had never had a clear shot. That feeling was quickly pushed aside when she heard Cerro calling her on the auxiliary radio receiver. Reaching down, Kozak flipped the remote radio frequency selection lever, taking her off her company command net and over to the battalion command net.
Waiting a second for the radio to reset, Kozak was about to respond to Cerro when the distinctive boom and screech of a TOW missile launch to her right caught her attention. Glancing over in that direction, she didn't see any indication that the 1st Platoon Bradley next to her had fired. It had to have been the other 1st Platoon Bradley. Looking out across the field, back to the northeast at the woods where the German tank had come from, she saw no sign of another enemy tank or a TOW missile headed that way. Something, she realized, was coming up on their flank through the woods. Anxious to reset her radio to the company net and find out what was going on, Kozak blurted a quick report on the battalion net. "Hotel 60, this is Charlie 60. I think we're in contact over on our right flank, in the woods. I'll report back in a minute. Out."
Without waiting for any sort of acknowledgment, Kozak flipped her frequency selection lever back to the company net and began calling her 1st Platoon.
Sitting next to the road, Cerro, perched atop his Bradley, felt overwhelmed. In quick succession he had watched the M-1 tank coming south toward him blow up, leaving his brigade and corps commanders on the road and exposed. Then he had watched a German tank come trundling out of the woods to the northeast while he was talking on the radio and had done nothing. Finally, just as things seemed to be getting under control, the commander of the company he was with called in, told him she thought they were in contact with enemy forces due east of their position, and then disappeared off the battalion radio net. Though he could clearly see Kozak's Bradley to his right, less than thirty meters away, it could have been a million miles away for all the attention she was paying him. Determined to solve one of his problems, he ordered his driver to back up and then move over to where Kozak's Bradley was sitting. If they couldn't talk on the radio, they could at least shout at each other.
Inching his way out to the edge of the tree line, Seydlitz, hunched low in his open hatch, scanned the open field to the south and west for any sign of danger. His gunner, able to see the hard-surfaced road to the west for the first time, saw an American personnel carrier racing north on that road toward the burning American tank and yelled out his acquisition report. "Achtung! Personnel carrier!"
Seydlitz, who was looking for more dangerous targets, ignored the gunner's sighting. His vigilance was rewarded when off to their left he caught sight of a Bradley in the wood line to the southwest backing up. Now he was ready to issue his fire command. "Achtung! Bradley, traverse left!" The gunner, aware of what was happening, complied until in the center of his primary sight he caught a glimpse of the retreating Bradley. Seydlitz, who had allowed the driver to advance a little further out to the edge of the tree line, finally ordered him to halt and prepare to engage the Bradley.
Unable to see anything from where his tank was, Second Lieutenant Ellerbee ordered his driver to move forward slowly. As they did so, Ellerbee ordered his gunner to keep his eyes open for the clump of trees across the field that would appear to their right once they had cleared the trees they had been hiding behind. With his head up out of his open hatch, Ellerbee looked first to his right at the trees to the southeast and then south down the hard-surfaced road where he watched Colonel Dixon's personnel carrier pull up next to another one behind the burning tank. They were using the destroyed tank as cover. He was thinking about how clever this was when his gunner screamed, "ENEMY TANK! TWELVE O'CLOCK IN THE WOOD LINE!"
Without even looking, Ellerbee dropped back into the turret, ordering the driver to stop and issuing a fire command as he went. As the gunner and loader yelled their responses, Ellerbee gave the command to fire before he even got his eye to his primary sight extension. Used to the rock and recoil of the powerful 120mm main gun by now, Ellerbee eased his eye up to the commander's extension just as the tank was settling back down from firing its first round. Though he could see from the fading whiffs of smoke that they had hit the Leopard tank, he knew they hadn't killed it, for its 120mm main gun, exactly the same type that was mounted on Ellerbee's tank, was now being trained on them.
At first neither Seydlitz nor his gunner realized that they had been hit. A sudden shudder and a soft scream from the driver's compartment, more of an excited exclamation, were the first clues that something was wrong. Only when Seydlitz noticed his tank jerk to the right did he call out, "Willie, what are you doing?"
"Captain, we've been hit. Right track I"
The gunner's scream cut him off. "ACHTUNG! PANZER!"
Looking back up to his sight, Seydlitz saw the American tank that had just fired on them as it appeared in the far right corner of their sight for the first time. "Forget the Bradley, engage the tank, now!"
Laying his sight on the center mass of the target, the gunner announced he was ready. Knowing that the American would continue to shoot till he saw his tank burn, Seydlitz didn't hesitate. "FIRE!"
They had hit it. Ellerbee knew they had hit the damned thing. But it wasn't dead. Without another thought, he yelled his new command as he watched the German's gun come to bear. "TARGET! RE-ENGAGE!"
Without waiting for the loader to finish announcing "UP!" Ellerbee's gunner screamed, "ON THE WAY!"
In quick succession, as if one finger had pulled the two triggers, both the Leopard and the M-1 fired. And with the skill and precision of veteran gunners aided by high technology, both gunners hit their marks. It was Ellerbee's tank, however, that got the worst of the exchange. Punching its way through the frontal armored plate on the left side of the turret, the armor-piercing round fired by Seydlitz's gunner scattered hot scraps of metal and debris as it continued through the crew compartment and into the ammo storage racks to the rear of the turret. There it ignited the propellant and the warheads of several rounds, beginning the process of destroying Ellerbee's tank.