It had all been a very near thing. So much could have gone wrong. The actual launching of the NORTHAG counter-offensive, for example, had depended on the possession of the area around Minister, south of the River Lippe, during the day of 14 August and the following night. Without that it was hard to see how the counter- offensive could have got under way at all. Soviet pressure from the north was heavy and continuous. The Battle of the Lippe, which has been written up elsewhere,[8] was another very important blow in the preservation of the Federal Republic from destruction.
By 16 August the newly arrived US corps, fighting in a flank position near Aachen, was threatening any further forward movement southwards along the Rhine. The Soviet armour never got further south than Julich.
The Warsaw Pact timetable had now been seriously upset and regrouping was necessary, involving not a retreat but certainly some rearward movement, beginning with the withdrawal of forward divisions in the Krefeld salient now threatened with encirclement. This was not, it must be clearly understood, a decisive military defeat for the Red Army. There were still huge forces at hand which could be brought to bear before the full potential of the United States could become effective. But it was a setback, a failure to achieve the early swift success which was rightly seen to be of such critical importance. It was a demonstration that the USSR, however powerful, was neither omnipotent nor invulnerable, and this offered encouragement to any in the Soviet Union or its satellite states who hoped at some time for a lifting of the dead hand of a communist regime.
“On 14 August a Soviet MiG-25
The 197 Motor Rifle Division, with its two light motor rifle regiments up, was by 0630 hours beginning to force a wedge into the enemy positions at the junction of I British and I German Corps. The advance was covered by the fire of 400 guns and supported in depth by 180 attack aircraft.
The tank and heavy motor rifle regiments were still deployed along their start lines, waiting for the light infantry to find a weakness in the hostile defences.
In the early morning mist, the punishment units that had reinforced the division were preparing for battle alongside Nekrassov’s battalion. Ammunition was only distributed to those units right in the firing line. They had no heavy weapons. Security at the punishment battalion rested with elderly, heavy-tracked BTR 50-PUs, from which the men in forward units were kept in the sights of automatic weapons. The punishment units were international. On Nekrassov’s right, arms were being distributed to Polish workers straight from prison, covered by the weapons of an East German security company. On his left, a battalion of Soviet dissidents were downing their vodka under convoy of a Polish company.
Nekrassov was now a Captain. The previous evening, everyone who had returned from the earlier engagements had received a medal. Officers’ epaulettes everywhere were brightened by a new sprinkling of stars. The regimental commander had presented Nekrassov with his new captain’s epaulettes, promising him he would be a major in three days’ time, if he was still alive. He himself had got to be lieutenant colonel from captain in just that time, and was now a colonel. Nekrassov was not encouraged. He stared into the distance chewing a piece of grass. It was just possible that he set more store by the support of stolid Boris, still driving his BMP, and the attentions of little Yuri, worn out and fast asleep now in the back of the BMP, than any hope of further advancement.
A curtain of black smoke hung over the wooded hills 2 kilometres away. Flights of monstrous metallic birds were again flying towards the smoke, the treetops bending in their infernal roar. Sometimes a whole squadron would fly past, sometimes they came over in pairs or fours. The noise as they screamed by made the soldiers duck, seconds after the black shadows had already flickered past over the column and were lost in the distance.
Tanks came rumbling past Nekrassov’s battalion: he realized that the tank regiment was now being put in. The punishment troops rode on the tanks. They had been issued with green battledress jackets but still wore their striped prison trousers.
“Where are you lot off to in your pyjamas?” Nekrassov’s men shouted at them.
But the punishment troops on the tanks did not understand a word. They were not Slavs. They were probably Romanians, put out there as enemies of the regime. Close alongside the Soviet tanks, lurching over the damaged road, BTR loaded with soldiers in Hungarian uniform were making sure that the punishment troops stayed with the tanks. Nekrassov reckoned that since the guard was Hungarian the punishment troops were almost certainly Romanian. Romanian and Soviet regimes were in full agreement on one point at least. Why feed dissenters in gaol if they can die heroes’ deaths for the regime?
The tank regiment carrying the punishment troops was sent into battle on a narrow sector, followed by three barrage infantry battalions, these followed in turn by the heavy motor rifle regiment with orders to shoot in the back any from the pyjama brigade who failed to show the right spirit.
By noon there were few punishment troops remaining. The tank regiment too had suffered heavy losses. It had been amalgamated during the course of the battle into a single battalion. The heavy motor rifle regiment had got off lightly, protected as it was by the tanks and pyjama boys. Now it, too, pushed forward. Although not itself a punishment regiment, none the less a barrage battalion of the KGB followed close on its heels, just to be on the safe side. There was hardly any opposition from the enemy. Groups of attacking Soviet BMP were moving into swift thrusts at the remaining pockets of defence.
By 1000 hours it was clear that the regiment had broken through into an undefended area. The regimental commander gave the order, “No skirmishing!” The regiment was to bypass any active defence and move on westwards with all possible speed.
The army attack had been made on three thrust lines at the boundaries of four enemy corps sectors. Two divisions had been held up. One, the 197 Motor Rifle Division, had broken through. In fact, the two divisions that had been checked had been almost completely wiped out, paving the way with their casualties for a battalion or even a regiment at a time to break through here and there, charging on regardless of threats from the flanks or of shortage of ammunition, or even damage to essential equipment.
The front commander decided to concentrate on the boundary between I British and I German Corps, where the defence was crumbling before the attack of his most successful division, the 197th. This was the critical time to throw the Tank Army Group into the attack.
Polish workers and NATO air attack had ensured that only one tank army out of the three poised in Belorussia was available in time. Even so, as Nekrassov knew, a single tank army was a formidable thing. The aim of tank forces, or the Tank Army Group, was to use the narrow openings made by the divisions and armies of the first echelon to thrust westwards, smashing a steel wedge through troop positions, communication centres and administration, destroying any hope of reintegrating the defence. It had to be like a million tons of water suddenly breaking through a little crack in a concrete dam where only a few drops at a time had been seeping through before.
The roar of the endless columns of 4 Guards Tank Army was deafening. The sky had vanished. A mist hung over everything and the faint disc of the sun hardly showed through the cloud of grey dust. What could withstand this avalanche?
The 197 Motor Rifle Division had broken through but was itself disintegrating. Nekrassov’s battalion, now comprising twenty-three BMP, and reinforced by a tank company with eight tanks, was on its own. All communication had been cut off. Divisional headquarters had almost ceased to function and now the regimental command appeared to have been taken out too. He could make no contact with them. Nekrassov knew that if the advanced units of the tank army were deployed on one of the neighbouring lines of advance, and not on his own, there would be for him and his command no hope at all. His regiment had split into three independent groups with no central command. There was no one behind him, only thousands of corpses and hundreds of burnt-out vehicles. If the approaching tanks attacked in his direction his battalion would be like the little fish that live round the jaws of a shark, with this tiny battalion ahead, the huge tank army behind. They would be safe.
With no orders, no information, Nekrassov suddenly sensed with certainty that the tanks had come into the attack behind him. There had been no air support for some hours past, but now the whole sky filled with the roar of rocket motors. It was clear that several air divisions had been put up to cover the attack. Now the tanks began to
