hammered the area around Alpha Company’s positions. Reynolds’ stomach turned to water every time a round landed nearby, and he buried his face in the dirt, in genuine fear for his life. He risked a glance to his right. Adams was curled up into an impossibly small ball, tucked into the space between two trees.
After the first few blasts didn’t kill him, his sense of duty took over. How were his men doing? Their foxholes would protect them from near misses, but they had little overhead cover. Even more important, he knew what he’d be doing, if he were the enemy commander.
He risked raising his head, buffeted by the pressure wave from an explosion in the middle distance. Raising his glasses and bracing them on the mound of dirt piled in front of his hole, Reynolds saw tanks, formed up in neat rows, advancing out of the distant woods.
He studied them for a minute, then reached over, lightly punching Adams in the side. The corporal looked up, and Reynolds shouted, “Get the arty. We need a fire mission, SADARM, ref point seven one. Got it?”
Adams nodded. He scuttled over to the field phone. Hugging the instrument close, the corporal passed on his captain’s message — screaming to be heard over the shells still howling in and exploding all around.
The important thing was to keep busy, Reynolds realized. Action helped suppress fear. He concentrated on his next move. One of the first tactical lessons any junior officer ever learned was the importance of retaining the initiative. You couldn’t let the enemy force you into reacting the way he wanted you to. Well, right now the Germans wanted him to keep his head down. He studied the advancing line, ignoring the shells still raining down all around.
The German batteries were firing blind, he decided — flinging shells out toward unseen map coordinates. With their forward scouting parties either dead or in flight, they couldn’t possibly have an observer close enough to adjust their rounds directly onto his positions. So the enemy gunners were just firing among the trees, not concentrating their barrage anywhere, or even aiming it accurately. Of course, there was still dumb luck, he thought as a near miss rattled his teeth. He spat out dirt.
Adams shouted in his ear, “Done, sir.” Besides the American guns, the 3/187th had a battery of Polish- manned 155s in direct support, with a full artillery battalion on call if they needed it.
“Great!” Reynolds ate dirt again as another 155mm round exploded close by. Fragments screamed overhead, tearing leaves and lethal splinters off the trees above the CP. He lifted his head again. “Have all the platoons check in.”
The corporal nodded, more intent on his task now.
The reports came back quickly, and they were encouraging. So far Hell Team had been lucky. A few men had been wounded by shell fragments or splinters of wood, but no one was dead. Not yet. Reynolds relaxed minutely, relieved that the moment had not yet arrived when he would have to deal with losing any of his men. But he couldn’t fool himself. Once the Germans started concentrating their artillery fire, his casualty count would skyrocket.
“Captain! Hewitt wants to open up!”
Sergeant Hewitt commanded the team’s attached TOW antitank platoon. The German Leopards were well inside effective range, and at the rate that they were moving, the sergeant and his ATGM gunners would only get a few shots in before they’d have to displace or be overrun. Reynolds understood that, but he had his own ideas. “Tell him we’re sticking to the original plan.”
Now, where the hell was that fire mission?
Reynolds steeled himself, studying the approaching tanks, counting them, checking their formations, trying to be all business. He could feel his insides starting to liquefy again. They were less than a thousand meters from his positions! He opened his mouth, just about ready to have the TOW missiles fire anyway, when the friendly artillery fire arrived, whistling past on its way toward the oncoming German tank company.
He raised his binoculars, looking above the armored formation.
The German barrage stopped suddenly, having done about as much as could be expected with unobserved fire. Besides, this far inside Poland, artillery ammunition was undoubtedly at a premium. Reynolds noticed the cessation only when he realized that he hadn’t flinched for a good minute.
A clump of small parachutes blossomed almost directly above the German Leopards. More followed in short order, popping into existence faster than the eye could follow.
Old-style HE barrages were rarely effective against armored units. Unless a round scored an incredibly lucky direct hit or knocked a track loose, tanks could roll right through the artillery fire, ignoring the man-killing fragments rattling off their armor. SADARM was an advanced form of artillery ammunition designed to give U.S. guns a way to kill enemy tanks.
Each of the tiny parachutes drifting toward German armored vehicles carried a small, sophisticated submunition. As the chute spiraled down, a millimeter-wavelength radar constantly scanned the ground in a slowly widening cone. The instant the seeker detected the characteristic radar profile of a tank, it would fire — sending a sharp-edged fragment lancing down through the tank’s thin top armor.
Puffs of smoke appeared beneath the chutes, each connected by a straight, glowing white line with a Leopard below. Three German tanks veered out of line and halted. Two were on fire.
In the same instant, Hell Team’s TOW and Javelin gunners fired another volley of antitank missiles. More Leopards died — hit before they could realize they were under attack from more than one direction.
A second ATGM volley was on its way before the Germans twigged to what was going on, and even then, the word didn’t get out to all their tanks in time. Only a handful popped smoke, triggering grenade launchers mounted on the turret sides. Those that did were suddenly covered in a dome of opaque whiteness, and Reynolds knew the smoke was multispectral, just as opaque to his team’s thermal imagers. Shit!
Three Leopards, the remnants of a platoon, surged out of their own smoke, swinging wide to flank the American-held treeline. One after the other, they stumbled into one of Hell Team’s minefields and stopped — immobilized by thunderous blasts that ripped tracks off road wheels and smashed through their weaker bottom armor.
Reynolds bared his teeth in a tight, tense grin. It had been relatively simple, given the range at which he’d planned to engage the Germans, to guess which way any tanks trapped in his kill zone would try to dodge.
Some of the tanks opened up, pumping 120mm rounds and long-range machine-gun fire into the trees ahead of them. Since the Germans could have only a general idea of where the American positions were, their shooting was wildly inaccurate. But the shells roaring overhead were impressive and terrifying, a new kind of fear for him to face.
All of the surviving Leopards were using smoke now, and weaving back and forth in violent evasive maneuvers. Reynolds was amazed at the agility of the fifty-five-ton monsters dancing over the ground at near- highway speeds. They were not advancing, though. Instead, the German vehicles started to disappear, hiding in folds in the ground or other cover. Good, thought Reynolds. Hooray for our side.
“Hewitt says he can’t see through the smoke,” Adams reported. The antitank section commander’s message was expected. Reynolds acknowledged, then told the corporal to pass the word: stand by for more artillery.
He craned his head, studying the wreck-strewn field in front of him.
Hell Team had seriously dinged the German tank company, inflicting far more losses than he’d expected. He guessed the Leopard commanders hadn’t expected to meet any opposition this far forward. The company, though, was only the lead element for a tank battalion, and the battalion for an armored or mechanized brigade. God alone knew what was backing that up.
Reynolds shook his head. He couldn’t stop them all, and he wasn’t about to play Fort Apache. Instead, he was presenting the Germans with a tactical problem, one that could be solved — but solving it would eat up precious time.
The book said that you didn’t charge dug-in troops with tanks. The book said that to push enemy foot soldiers out of the woods, you suppress them with artillery, then send in your own dismounted infantry to clear it, man-to- man.
He searched the German-held woods, two kilometers away. Past the wisps of clearing smoke, he could see a line of boxy, angled troop carriers pouring out of the trees. This time there really were dozens of them, with more Leopards coming right behind. They were just dots at this range, but he worked out the math: The Marders could cover that first kilometer in just three minutes, From that point, the panzergrenadiers they carried would dismount and cover the next thousand meters on foot. He had roughly ten minutes before they’d be close enough to engage.
