He was in the process of weighing the pros and cons of moving parts of his company to the right into the fight when the sound of an M-113 armored personnel carrier coming up behind him caught his attention. Leaning over and looking to his rear, he noticed that it was the battalion's operations officer. With the same casual disregard for speed that most Germans display when driving their personal cars on the autobahns, the driver of the personnel carrier pulled around the rear of Seydlitz's tank without slowing down. When the battalion operations officer riding in the open commander's hatch of the personnel carrier was even with Seydlitz, the driver of the personnel carrier brought his vehicle to a sudden stop. The operations officer, used to the driver's habits, hung on to the machine gun at his position with one hand and the rim of the hatch with the other as he absorbed the recoil of the sudden stop by merely swaying back and forth like a jack-in-the-box that had just been sprung.
Like many officers in the panzer corps, the operations officer freely demonstrated his individuality and devil-may-care attitude by wearing his cloth garrison cap instead of a steel helmet. Pulling the radio earphone from one of his ears, the operations officer yelled to Seydlitz as soon as he stopped swaying. "Seydlitz, your company will remain here and assume responsibility for the entire battalion's battle position. The rest of the battalion will move, as soon as the last of the enemy vehicles are found and destroyed, to an attack position south of here in preparation for a new effort to break through to the west. You will report directly to the 1st Panzer Brigade and remain in place until ordered to join us either tomorrow or the next day. Is that clear?"
Not sure that he had heard everything over the noise of his tank's engine and that of the personnel carrier, not to mention the ongoing fight somewhere off to their right, Seydlitz restated his orders as he understood them. "So, I'm attached to brigade with the mission of holding fast here until ordered to join you sometime tomorrow west of here."
The operations officer nodded. "That's right." Replacing the earphone over his ear, the operations officer yelled into the intercom for his driver to move out. With a jerk, the driver slammed down the personnel carrier's accelerator and went charging off back toward the sound of the battle. The operations officer, without so much as a look back, swayed this way and that, ducking low-hanging branches with a well-measured casualness as his driver picked up speed and disappeared in the direction from which they had come.
Though he was happy to have received definite orders and therefore relieved of the need to exercise his own initiative, Seydlitz didn't like the idea of being left behind. Success in holding empty woodlots in central Germany against attacks wasn't going to end this fight. Seydlitz knew this, as he was sure that his superiors did. Only by attacking would they be able to bring the renegade Americans under control and demonstrate for anyone who needed the lesson that Germany was a sovereign and independent nation. That he wouldn't be part of that effort suddenly overcame Seydlitz's common sense that should have told him that attacks in this terrain, just like the one that his battalion was still in the process of beating down, were costly and often led to failure. He was, however, a Panzertruppen, a tank soldier with a proud family heritage and the member of a branch of service that had once been the scourge of all of Europe. If he was to serve, he wanted to be in the forefront like his ancestors.
But Seydlitz was a soldier, a German soldier. And like all good soldiers who had orders that were clear and concise, he knew he had to obey them. Though his personal preference would have been to leave the defense to someone else, it was his duty to follow his orders regardless of how unpleasant they were.
With a sigh, Seydlitz noticed a slackening of noise. The fight to his right was ending. Settling down into his hatch, he reached for his map and began to study it as he considered how best to deploy his company once the rest of the battalion pulled out.
Just south of Autobahn E40 in what used to be East Germany, Company C, 3rd of the 3rd Infantry, lead element of Scott Dixon's brigade, ran into the flank guard of the 2nd Panzer Division. It was, like most of the engagements that Dixon's brigade was stumbling into on the 20th, a chance encounter. But the fact that these meetings between the 2nd Panzer Division's 2nd Brigade and Dixon's brigade were accidents didn't make them any less deadly. Racing north along a muddy, deeply rutted road that cut through the forest south of the autobahn, Captain Nancy Kozak kept checking her map while watching for the vehicles of 2nd Platoon. Behind her the tanks of Ellerbee's platoon followed.
For the third time in less than twenty-four hours, Kozak found herself rushing into the middle of a crisis at full speed with little or no information. In Dermbach the night before Ellerbee and his platoon had charged into the middle of a street fight with anti-tank guided-missile carriers before she could get there. That morning her 1st Platoon leader, Second Lieutenant Sly Ahern, had made a wrong turn just after dawn and run head-on into a German artillery column that was in the process of setting up. And now her 2nd Platoon, which was acting as the battalion's advance guard, was in the middle of a hasty attack against an enemy force of unknown size. As she ducked to avoid low-hanging branches, the only thought that kept coming to mind, despite the desperateness of the situation and the mental exhaustion that was beginning to wear on her, was which would kill her first: enemy action or the antics of her platoon leaders.
Though Ellerbee's tanks were technically faster, the 63-ton M-1A1 tanks of Ellerbee's platoon with their wider chassis and oversized main gun protruding well to the front could not keep up with Kozak's Bradley C60 as it ran through the narrow, twisting forest trail that none of their maps showed. Through the use of such trails, the bulk of Dixon's brigade had been able to avoid hasty roadblocks and defensive positions set up to cover the obvious routes of advance that the Germans had thrown up between Dixon and Autobahn E40. With the goal of cutting across the rear of the 2nd Panzer Division and raising hell with its rear area supply and service units, Dixon had ordered his battalion commanders to keep their own supply vehicles tucked up close, ignore their flanks and rear, and run hell-bent for leather north until they hit the autobahn, destroying anything that belonged to the German Army along the way. The battalion commanders in making their plans had included Dixon's instructions word for word in their own orders. Company commanders, well drilled in Dixon's style of leadership and tactics, passed their commander's intent on to their platoon leaders and saw to it that those orders were carried out with a vengeance. It should have come as no surprise then that Gross had simply seized the initiative and gone right into the attack.
He was, after all, following his brigade commander's intent to the letter.
That, however, did not excuse him in Kozak's mind from reporting to her what he was facing and what he was doing. As C60 bucked and swerved along the rutted trail, Kozak hoped that her young and energetic platoon leader hadn't bitten off more than he could deal with. Well aware of the pitfalls that most second lieutenants of infantry allow themselves to fall into, since she herself had been one, Kozak was hurrying forward with all the firepower she could muster as fast as she could. Though Ellerbee was still far from her favorite platoon leader, the performance of his platoon in Dermbach had shown that he was capable of reacting under fire and getting the job done. Of course, neither Dixon nor Kozak knew that Ellerbee's clever maneuver around the German anti-tank unit had actually been a mistake. The results had been good, and therefore the maneuver that had led to that success was termed brilliant.