The president looked up, astounded. “By whom?”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff knew and Trainor knew they knew, but coming from them, it could look almost self-serving. It was for a moment as if each of the Joint Chiefs, aware that history was being made, did not want to come out on the wrong side of it.
“Some of Suzlov’s generals see this as their chance,” Trainor proffered quietly, adding in an even quieter but more chilling tone, “As the British would say, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound.’ “
“What in hell does that mean?” snapped the president.
“Go for broke,” Trainor answered quietly. “The NATO forces might be reeling. They won’t get another chance like this for a hundred years.”
Harry Schuman, sitting next to Admiral Horton, was nodding in agreement. “Hardliners have been fretting ever since Gorbachev’s reductions. I think Mr. Trainor is correct in his assessment.”
Mayne was rubbing his forehead. “All right, General Gray. What’ll it take?”
“Rollover, sir.” He meant the NATO policy of “Atlantic necessity,” of the U.S., British, and other NATO navies, but primarily the U.S. and British, having to accept enormous losses, simply roll over them, to get the reinforcements of men, materiel, and food to reinforce Europe if they were to have any hope of pushing the Russians back.
“Mr. President,” said Admiral Horton, “in the first hundred and eighty days we’re looking at a minimum of six thousand cargo ships. Each ship making six round trips. Means a minimum of thirty-four cargo ships a day — excluding naval battle groups for escort and carrier air cover for the convoys.”
“Can we do it?”
“We do it or we lose Europe.”
“Do it,” said Mayne.
At that moment Trainor knew that from here on in the government of the United States would function from the bombproof shelter of the White House situation room and that Senator Leyland had just lost his bid for the presidency.
On Capitol Hill, the entire place under the heaviest security ever seen in Congress, President Mayne, for purposes of national as well as European morale, made his address from the House of Representatives, as Roosevelt had done, to show Europe that both Democrats and Republicans supported him. As he mounted the podium, the silence was palpable as the speaker invited the president to address the Congress.
“This day, as you know, war has broken out in Europe. Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies have attacked the NATO alliance through the very Iron Curtain that for years past has been the front line between the forces of freedom and those of oppression. And once again the United States has been called upon to stem the tide of tyranny, a tide given its force by those in Moscow who in their unshakable Communist determination wish to rule not only the Soviet Union but the rest of the world. I have asked Premier Suzlov several times this day through the offices of the Soviet Embassy to agree to a cease-fire by midnight tonight Washington time. Should I not receive the answer we want — that hostilities shall cease at that time, that both NATO and the Soviet-Warsaw Pact units will withdraw to the positions they occupied before hostilities began — then we must understand that a state of war exists between the United States and the Soviet Union and her allies.
“I ask you all to join with me, to pray for peace but to stand ready for war. We, like all our allies, hold our breath for all mankind, for all those on the edge of the abyss. But should it come to this, we are resolved to fight if we have to, with all the resources at our disposal. Let us be calm, but let us be firm, firm in the conviction of those Americans who have gone before us, for those Americans who went to do battle with the evils of Hitler and all those of his ilk who would make us slaves and extinguish the flame of freedom.
“Rest assured that the United States will do all in its power to bring the hostilities to a quick and peaceful end. But if our overtures of peace are rebuffed, then the fate of our children is at hand and will reside in our determination, as Americans, to stand up to a bully in the only way we know how: in the words of another American, ‘to give him a thrashing he’ll never forget.’ God bless you all.”
Trainor was stunned, as was a good part of the Congress, by born the brevity and starkness of the president’s oration. Suddenly the Congress erupted in applause as the president walked from the podium, surrounded by a standing ovation. The people, Trainor saw, had done what Americans had always done, rallied about the presidency in times of national peril.
The Secret Service contingent was unable to hold the members of Congress back as they crowded about to shake the president’s hand, but Mayne, his demeanor calm, his stride purposeful, walked up to Senator Leyland and extended his hand. For that moment in the nation’s history, following the speech, beamed all over America, time seemed to stand still and there were no Democrats or Republicans, blacks or whites, there were only Americans.
Trainor’s beaming smile was not simply that of a PR man’s victory but one of genuine affection for his boss; the Hemingway paraphrase about thrashing a bully was a master stroke, he thought — so long as no one pointed out that Hemingway had committed suicide.
By 4:17 a.m. the Fulda Gap was choked with armor, the destruction by the U.S. Fifth Army’s artillery so unabatedly concentrated that east of the Gap, the plain looked like some vast scrap-yard strewn with the steaming hulls of over a thousand Soviet-Warsaw Pact tanks, the majority of these being obsolete T-62s, of which the Russians alone had twenty-three thousand in reserve and which were unofficially known among the Moscow general staff as dryan— “fodder.” But the tanks had kept coming, and at times, with the air-ripping scream of wire-guided and fire-and-forget antitank missiles, blanket artillery fire and the cacophony of assorted small arms, barrels threatening to jam from unprecedented sustained action, U.S. and West German troops manning tank graders had to be called in to clear a way through as more and more NATO units arrived.
The A-10 Thunderbolts, or rather those who managed to penetrate the increasingly accurate Russian SAM screen, continued to buoy Meir’s spirit. Though his hearing had long gone in the deep fallback bunker at Alfa Two, he still managed to glimpse with awe the twin-engined jets screaming in just above tree level, their seven-barreled Avenger Gatling guns ripping into the oncoming S-WP armor, the stream of the thirty-millimeter cannon fire stuttering into the tanks at over seventy rounds a second, many of the tanks exploding, illuminating others nearby, which became the Thunderbolts’ next targets.
The antitank missiles were doing well, but it was the A-10s that, despite their losses, continued to be the best antitank weapon NATO had in the field, augmenting the fire of the hidden M-1s, whose 120-millimeters kept thumping away from the woods, although many of the American tanks, over 270, had been destroyed by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact onslaught.
As the carnage continued, the biggest surprise to the NATO generals was that the highly touted and sophisticated Swedish BILL antitank missile system, proven so effective at homing in above and destroying the thinner turret armor, was being foiled by the less-sophisticated Soviet T-72 tanks with reactive armor packs on the turret as well as around it and by foil-spewing ejectors that scrambled the incoming missiles’ homing radar. The BILL top-attack warheads, however, extracted a savage price in S-WP infantry — the Russian BMPs’, personnel carriers’, much thinner armor and tracks easily penetrated by the missiles. But still the Russians and East Germans kept coming, astonishing the forward infantry companies of U.S. Fifth Army by using infantry in several instances to clear a minefield before the tanks by running through it, an old Russian tactic from the days of Stalingrad.