The Soviet Fencers supporting the GDR advance did not have it all their own way as the NATO air forces rose to meet them. But the overwhelming numbers of Soviet and Warsaw Pact fighters meant that the NATO fighters trying to contain breakthroughs on the Northern Plain, in the center along the Fulda axis and in the south on the alluvial flats of the Danube, were stretched too thinly, the NATO commander not knowing where the twenty Russian divisions held in reserve would be thrown in, therefore unable to concentrate wholly on any one sector.
It was a Soviet-Warsaw Pact strategy designed for the quick win, to push NATO so far, so quickly, that in the case of a ceasefire ranovato—”early in the game”—the Soviet-Warsaw Pact would have in its possession at least a third of West Germany and a sizable strip of Holland 50 miles wide and 130 miles long north of NATO’s air-control center at Gelsenkirchen.
The NATO pilots were exacting a high price, but against all the other intangibles of battle was the stark mathematical fact, known for years before the war, that NATO could not outlast sheer quantity, even with a kill ratio in the air of two to one in the first seventy-six hours.
On the ground the situation was worse, the tank commanders facing Sergei Marchenko and the other ten thousand Soviet tanks having had to maintain a four-to-one kill ratio merely to hold ground.
In the wake of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact three-pronged attack, the old confident air among NATO commanders about Western quality versus Russian quantity took on a decidedly hollow ring.
Leading three other F-16s, one of the NATO pilots, Colonel Delcorte, his F-16 still climbing though getting low on fuel, was in his fourth sortie within seven hours. Based in Hahn with the U.S. Tenth Tactical Wing, Delcorte now had only fourteen of his twenty-six-plane squadron left. Ten were downed outright; two had managed to return to Hahn but were badly shot up.
Of the ten downed planes, three reported bailouts: one’s chute was seen high above Fulda Gap, presumably drifting down over East Germany, the other two pilots picked up southwest of the Bielefeld-Dortmund basin in a heavily wooded section serving as revetment areas for the battered Chieftains. The British-made battle tanks, which, though first-rate and well armed with 120-millimeter cannons and assisted by crack British infantry regiments from the Army of the Rhine, were doomed because of their slower speed compared to the Russian T-90 A’s seventy-five kilometers per hour. Had the Chieftains more time to dig in, it might have been a different story, for as Sergei Marchenko and fellow S-WP tank commanders quickly realized, the breakdown rate of the Soviet tanks was much higher than for those of the Allies. But though the British Chieftains were well served by their appliqué Chobham armor packs and first-rate crews, they could not overcome the Russians’ three-to-one superiority in tanks.
At Fulda Gap, where the Russians had been unable to use their jellied gas bombs, the latest British Challengers, German Leopard IIs and American M-1s lasted much longer in battles where foam-filled, self-sealing rubber fuel tanks took many direct hits from armor-piercing shots without exploding.
In the Bielefeld-Dortmund area, The Russian T-90s, built to accommodate the shortest Russian tank crews and so presenting the lowest silhouette of any main battle tank, swung out wide through the British Chieftains’ heavily laid white smoke screens and regrouped in ambush, isolating several Chieftains at a time. In the process, the smoke- and dust-filled battleground confused the pilots of the American Thunderbolts, who had to make split-second differentiation between Russian and British tanks — this becoming increasingly difficult in the dense smoke as the day wore on. It was, Delcorte thought, his F-16 leveling out high above the smoke, as terrible, or from the Russian point of view, as good, an example of using superior numbers as you could get, quite literally mugging the opposition with sheer brute force and size.
The only hope, Delcorte knew, was to keep going up, keep engaging them until the Juggernauts’ attack was blunted, when finally there would be so many tanks off tread, so many automatic shell extractors in the T-90s out of alignment due to overheating and crews’ fatigue, that the West’s overall superiority in technology, including more tank transports, would start to pay off. Delcorte took some hope from the fact that NATO’s Medevac and air crew rescue units were of uniform high quality. This was a crucial factor if NATO pilots were to fly and fight again. Delcorte and the other three F-16s in the finger four formation, resembling the spacing of a right hand’s four fingertips, the little finger farther back, entered heavy cloud. At six thousand, Delcorte was still in it, the other three pilots in the clear, the wingman on his left advising him there were “Bogeys — six of them at one o’clock. Seven thousand.”
“Keep going for the top,” Delcorte instructed, the prearranged ceiling having been ten thousand feet, from which they hoped they could dive down upon the funnel leading to the Fulda Gap.
“Bogeys below — nine o’clock,” came the next report.
“Go for the top,” Delcorte repeated evenly, though in fact he had a multiplicity of incoming messages and warning signals, all of them conflicting, during his effort to outclimb the Bogeys coming in from the east, ignoring those passing below en route to shoot up the withdrawing Americans of the Black Horse division.
It was tempting to Delcorte to break the four-plane formation and go into two fighting pairs, a leader and wingman, the latter watching the leader’s COV — cone of vulnerability. This would leave him, as the flight leader, free from blind side attack if he dove in to break up the enemy formation. He was also tempted to go to a fluid four formation, having two of the F-16s a thousand feet abreast in front, the other two, ten thousand feet apart behind. All these options sped through Delcorte’s head in a split second, then, seeing the Soviet fighters still climbing, trying to get an advantage over the Americans, he forgot Fulda Gap and decided to attack.
Once the combat began, the geometry of flight formations was lost, two Soviet Foxbats winking orange, then gone in cloud, the air-to-air Acrid missiles streaking toward the American Falcons in excess of fourteen hundred meters a second, the faster F-16s already breaking, their pilots hitting the superchargers, climbing fast, trying to expose only their cold side to the Foxbats to deny their afterburners’ exhaust to the heat-seeking Acrids. One American turned too late, and a dirty orange burst lit up inside a cloud, followed by broken thunder. The other three Falcons were on the northern flank of the Foxbats, who now had separated, three going ahead to Fulda Gap, three remaining to engage.
Watching his HUD — head-up display — afterburners on full, going air to air, Delcorte saw the green impact line on the HUD, where graphics condensed a thousand variables to a single display. The target vector was arcing right, cutting through three parallel lines. There was such a jumble of chatter, radio cuts from the Technicolor spread of the tank battles far below him, fragments of other NATO feed-ins, aerial and ground control, a smattering of Russian, that Delcorte, feeling he was ODing on noise, shut them all down except for that of his own formation. He rolled the Falcon, tried for a scissors, turning hard left, and was on a Foxbat’s tail. One hundredth of a second later, the HUD’s three green horizontals were cut by a green arc ending in a dot. Delcorte flicked the stick again. The dot moved toward center. The Foxbat banked hard left, Delcorte’s lines altered, the dot slipping below the line, Delcorte cursing, flicking the stick again, not worrying about sighting the Russian’s afterburner, sliding in with the cannon. He flicked one, twice more, but held his fire — at this angle the Foxbat could outrun his bullets. The green dot shifted, centered. He pressed the red, the.20-millimeter cannon sounding like a rip in the fuselage. He saw parts of the Foxbat breaking off, pulled away before any more came at him.