To the west, sitting on the side of Highway 84 just around a bend in the road from where his platoon leader was supposed to come out of the woods next, Sergeant Emerson saw the ball of flame leap up over the treetops. Immediately following that he heard the crack of a high-velocity cannon firing. Someone, he knew, had fired, and someone had died. Without a second thought, Emerson ordered his driver to move forward slowly up to the bend in the road so that he could see what was going on. Emerson's gunner, unable to see anything, yelled out asking what was happening. In a voice that never seemed to betray excitement or stress, Emerson responded by simply telling his gunner to keep his eye glued to the sight and be ready to engage. Emerson in the same calm voice told the loader who had been riding with his head popped up out of the turret to get down, load sabot, and arm the gun. Even before he heard the loader's yell, "SABOT LOADED," Emerson had eased himself down into the turret so that only his head and shoulders showed above the lip of his open hatch. With his hand on the tank commander's turret override, he, like the rest of the crew, was ready.
Though the flames had died down some, whatever had been hit, and Emerson feared the worst, was still burning. The fire created an eerie light that lit the road and the trees that lined it at the bend ahead. Moving toward that point, Emerson slowly began to traverse the turret so that as soon as his tank rounded the bend the main gun would be pointed down the center of the road toward the east. Like everyone else in the crew, Emerson held his breath as he felt his pulse rate quicken in anticipation of what they would find. Taking a quick glance to his rear, he could see his wing man Sergeant Allston's tank, following at the same pace, off to one side of the road. Satisfied that he was ready, Emerson faced back to the front just as the front slope of his tank began to inch out around the bend. With a simple "Okay, here we go," Emerson prepared his crew.
The scene to his front confirmed his worst nightmare. The road leading toward Rasdorf was lined on either side by tall pine trees. Less than three hundred meters ahead, through the light snow that continued to drift down, Emerson saw the gun tube and front of a burning tank. Half protruding out of the woods, hanging on the road embankment and blocking one lane of the road, it was burning furiously. For a second he tried to confirm that it was in fact an Abrams tank. The motion, however, of another vehicle emerging from the darkness beyond the burning tank caught Emerson's attention. Instinctively he slewed the gun tube in the direction of this threat, more perceived than confirmed. Ordering his driver to stop, Emerson watched.
From further down the road, the black form moved to one side of the road as it tried to bypass the burning tank. Emerson was about to drop down and check out this vehicle through the thermal sight when he clearly saw it turn its turret to the left in the direction of the burning tank and fire at something in the woods beyond it. Without any hesitation, without waiting for any further evidence, Emerson shouted out a quick fire command. "GUNNER, SABOT, TANK!"
Both the gunner and loader responded in unison, "IDENTIFIED!" "UP!"
To which Emerson replied, "FIRE!"
At a range of three hundred meters, the flight time of Emerson's armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot round, which is a small depleted uranium dart launched at speeds greater than one mile a second, was indistinguishable from the rock and recoil of the main gun on Emerson's tank. By the time the muzzle blast had cleared, their target had already been hit and was beginning to be rocked by secondary explosions. Satisfied that the target was finished, Emerson dropped down to look at it through the tank commander's extension to the gunner's primary sight. When he did, the image that greeted him made his heart sink. The tank that he had just engaged and killed was without a doubt a German Leopard II. That, of course, meant that the burning tank sticking out of the woods was his platoon leader's tank. Knowing that German tanks, like American tanks, never travel alone, Emerson jumped back up and ordered his driver to back up around the bend. From there he could call, in an effort to find out what had happened to Dallas and even more important to inform his company commander that they had made contact with the enemy and report the results of that contact. The thought that he had witnessed the opening shots of the shooting war had not yet dawned upon Sergeant First Class Emerson. Such things were of no real concern to him. He was, as the commander of the German Leopard tank had been, simply doing what he was trained to do.
Impatiently, Big Al Malin waited for the morning update to end. He already understood both the nature and the severity of the situation that the Tenth Corps faced. The straight line between Alsfeld in the west and Hünfeld in the east was approximately thirty-five kilometers, or twenty-one miles. Between those two points, Autobahn A7 and Highway 27 ran north to Kassel from Fulda in the south. It was at this critical point amongst the hills and forests of central Germany that the Bundeswehr, prodded by Ruff, chose to strike first.
Neither the location nor the units involved were a surprise to the Tenth Corps' senior commanders. Big Al's intelligence officer had been tracking the progress of the 2nd Panzer Division from Erfurt in the east and the 10th Panzer Division coming up from Frankfurt in the west for some time. Warnings had gone out to the commanders of the 4th Armored Division and the 55th Mech Infantry Division to be prepared to block those thrusts, something that both commanders set about to do. Yet even as the commanders and staff's of the Tenth Corps and its two divisions went through the motions of preparing for the confrontation, many hoped that the maneuvers of the two panzer divisions were nothing more than posturing. That was why almost to a man the staff officers of Tenth Corps felt an uncomfortable sinking feeling that morning when they briefed Big Al on initial contacts, like Sergeant Emerson's. The hope of being able to make it to the sea without a serious confrontation was in an instant washed away by the blood of these first battles. It had come, as Big Al had predicted, to a fight. Now in a matter of hours it would become a death struggle for the Tenth Corps.
The corps G-2 intelligence officer himself presented the briefing that morning. Like the other briefers, he referred to a large map covered with clear plastic sheets that took up the entire wall of the expandable tractor-trailer van which served as the corps briefing area. In his usual clear and unemotional monotone voice, the G-2 presented as clear a picture as possible of the enemy's current situation and what he thought their intent was as he used his retractable pointer to indicate the unit symbols on the map he was talking about. The German units coming from the east and west were depicted in red. All major German maneuver units, down to brigade, were displayed with arrows to show where they were headed. This, of course, was toward Autobahn A7, the Tenth Corps' main axis of advance north. Between those arrows American units, shown in blue, reminded Big Al of a big bubble, a fragile bubble, which he realized was being prodded by ice picks.
In the west the American 55th Mechanized Infantry Division coming up from Würzburg aimed for Alsfeld. A relatively minor town, Alsfeld had no real strategic or tactical importance other than that was where two mechanized forces brought together by the roads that converged there collided on the morning of the 19th. It was, however, more of a cautious bumping together like bumper cars at a carnival than a head-on collision between two steaming locomotives. The commander of the 10th Panzer Division, Major General Albert Kiebler, unsure of the political situation, had intentionally moved slowly. Troubled by a light turnout of reservists, the 10th Panzer could only muster seven full panzer and panzergrenadier battalions by the 18th of January. And even the determination and combat value of the soldiers in those battalions was open to question as debate amongst the officers raged as to who was the true enemy of the German people. This left Kiebler with the impression that his division was at best a fragile weapon that he feared would shatter under heavy pressure.