“And how,” his wife had asked him, “do we get across the strip?” She meant the mines, many of which had been left in place after the West and Gorby’s Moscow had ended. He told her he had mounted a roller plow on the front with loose chains to act as flails. Nothing new about the idea. Old as the hills.
“It’s crazy,” she told him.
“Woman,” he’d replied, “when the shooting starts, there will not be time to discuss what we might do. But where do you prefer to take your chances? In the East or the West?” His argument was sound enough as it went, and a rainy night was made to order. Still there were two things wrong. The first was a loose bearing on the tractor’s right wheel, making the squeak of the tractor even more pronounced than usual, and the white flag, which wouldn’t have made any difference to the East Germans anyway, was so sodden by the rain that it didn’t flap at all but merely hugged the pole like some thin, frightened ghost.
In the East German’s infrared scope, whatever was moving disappeared for a moment behind a wood but then came back into view as a frosty outline, nearing the fence. In Tower Alfa, Hans Meir tried to make his decision. This wasn’t the bridge leading to the Rhineland in ‘36 where Grandfather said you could see the Nazis clearly coming at you. But, of course, using camouflage is precisely what the Russians would do — trying to confuse Alfa just long enough.
“Den Mann halten!”— “Stop him!” ordered the Russian liaison officer. “It’s an American mine clearer.” The East German fired. Meir didn’t see the antitank missile streaking toward the trace, only a white streak across the infrared scope—
“Back-blast!” said Malvinsky. “Ten o’clock.”
“Got it in sight?” asked Meir.
“In sight,” answered Malvinsky, the AT launcher on his shoulder.
“Fire!” Malvinsky fired at the East German back-blast position, bits and pieces, probably signed pine branches, still visible like pricks of orange snow melting on the glass of his infrared scope. Nearer the trace was a rolling fireball followed by pieces of flaming debris from the tractor. There was no human noise, the tractor stopped.
The East German fired back at Alfa’s Tower, but by then Meir and Malvinsky were halfway down the staircase and into the jeep, pulling back to the next position in the pines on their side of the strip. The East German rocket missed the tower, crashing into the pines above them, setting the trees afire and throwing long shadows across their dugout. Meir fired three scarlet emergency flares. As they burst high above Alfa One HQ, the Soviet headquarters at Zossen-Wünsdorf, using the old-fashioned radio lines, ordered “Operation Home Rule” to begin.
Twenty Soviet-Warsaw Pact divisions, infantry and four thousand tanks, began to move, preceded by hundreds of strike aircraft, primarily SU-24/Fencers for ground support and MiG-29s with air-to-air Alamo and antiradiation, antiradar air-to-surface missiles, with Russian NR-30-millimeter tank-destroying cannon, all converging on the Fulda Gap. Most of the Soviet aircraft, while visible on U.S. and European satellite pictures, were not visible to the knocked-out fiber-optical radar systems on NATO’s central front, north and south of the Fulda Gap. Here the Soviets’ AFOMs, anti-fiber-optic measures, had been most effective. Nevertheless, in response to the firing in Berlin and the flares at Outpost Alfa, NATO, as part of its “forward defense, flexible response” strategy, sent hundreds of M-1s toward the gap while concealed 155-millimeter and 203-millimeter artillery guns behind Fulda began pounding the gap through which the T-80 echelons were expected to come pouring. Heavily camouflaged tanks of the U.S. Eleventh Armored, dug in behind preselected revetment areas in defilade positions, waited should the Soviet-Warsaw Pact tanks burst through the saturating fire of the artillery. In their deep, second forward observation hole, Hans Meir and Malvinsky hunkered down by the infrared periscope, ground shaking all about them, trees trembling as the deadly artillery rained down only a quarter mile from them.
“This is it, Fritz,” said Malvinsky.
“Ja.” Meir pulled a walkie-talkie from the OP’s alert kit.
They had been taught and they understood that for them there could be no retreat; their only job, the most important of all as NATO front line OPs, was to hold as long as they could, to give situation reports vital to the artillery and tanks. To buy time. As Malvinsky stayed glued to the periscope, seeing the earth erupting before him in jagged white plumes on the infrared, he could hear Meir cranking up the minefield charge box for their sector. “Are they coming through yet?” he asked Malvinsky.
“Jes-us!” replied the American. “Have a look at this!”
General Sutherland had told them the Soviet-Warsaw Pact would most likely come through in echelons of fives, two wing-men, one either side of the three center tanks, to protect the flank. But to see his infrared’s circle blocked solid with the thermal waves of so many, to actually see more tanks than he had ever seen in his life coming straight for him, was something that no amount of live ammunition training or anything else had prepared them for. “Settle down,” said Meir, as much to himself as to Malvinsky. “Are they in our sector yet?”
“Hundred meters to go,” said Malvinsky. “Hold it.”
The forest was erupting, trees splitting all about them, the scream of hot metal shards carving up the air. Malvinsky swung the infrared scope around, and for as far as the eye could see there were thick, billowing clouds of white and the steady pomp, pomp, pomp of smoke grenades spewing from the forward tanks, whose earsplitting frenzied sound was now joined by the NATO mines as they began detonating. Meir heard the distinctive screech of tracks coming off roller wheels and the heavy metallic thumps as the mine-disabled tanks were shoved aside by those behind them, who now continued converging on the gap.
Within minutes a squadron of NATO A-10s came in low over the trees, wings rocking in their tight subsonic turns, almost like a car too powerful for its driver. Despite the rain and darkness, the A-10s performed superbly as they flew below the Russian MiGs and Fencers, their telltale “bug-eyed” twin jets, well back, and the high lizard-patterned khaki-green camouflage visible in flare light. The A-10 Thunderbolts showed astonishing virtuosity, seeming almost to hover momentarily, their noses down, the forty-two-hundred-round-per-minute, 30-millimeter cannon spitting out long orange tracer. Wherever the cannon fire struck the Russian tanks’ reactive armor, the 30-millimeter bullets disintegrated the explosive-reactive armor, destroying the cannon’s bullets before they could even penetrate the tank metal proper. But wherever the rain of orange cannon fire found the thinner-skinned turrets, it was enough to stop the tank, the air inside the vehicle a whizzing cloud of white-hot razors, many of the tanks exploding as the A-10s’ fire not only passed through the turret but superheated the tank’s own supply of ammunition by the loader. As well, most of the big American 155- and 203-millimeter self-propelled guns behind Alfa One were able to change position before the answering Soviet-Warsaw Pact batteries got a fix on them and were now tearing into the more than five hundred T-72s and T-80s that were the first to reach the Fulda Gap.
The Russian tanks now within range, the dug-in M-1s and M-60s were waiting until the last minute for their best shots to stop the Russian tanks that had survived the deluge of artillery and the assault of the U.S.-Luftwaffe Tenth Tactical Fighter Wing. At times the NATO fighters managed to penetrate the thick Russian MiG cover, below which Soviet Fencers were providing ground support for their tanks, their wings no longer swept back but in the straight lateral position as they came in low, seeking out the American A-10s.