gentlemen, will be determined by the commanders and soldiers out there in units spread all over Germany. And right now those units are, without exaggerating, choking on their own supply lines, lines that run throughout Germany like a plate of spilled noodles. Added to all of this military movement is the mass migration of civilians, some seeking to get out of harm's way and some simply trying to carry on with their lives as if nothing has changed. It will be days before we know for sure if we can pull off the great plans which we so easily toss about here in the warmth of this building.'
Unable to effectively counter Lange's argument, Ruff, Rooks, and Lammers let the meeting limp to an unsettling close. Lange for the moment had succeeded in buying the time he wanted. He had no idea what could happen to change what he was convinced Ruff saw as an inevitable confrontation. Until the first blood was drawn, there was always the chance of a negotiated settlement. The longer the conflict was postponed the better. Still, Lange could not delay forever. He knew that he could only buy so much time with which to allow the political situation to clarify itself by walking the fine line between performing his duty as a soldier and doing what his conscience dictated. At some point, and he had no idea where or when that would happen, time would run out.
The effect of shifting of forces from one place to another was a very real concern to Captain Friedrich Seydlitz as his column of Leopard II tanks rumbled back to the west down Autobahn E40 just outside of Dresden. The orders to move the two panzer, or tank, battalions of the brigade 230 kilometers by road to Erfurt, after having completed a 270-kilometer road march from the south, were greeted with little joy. Every officer took great pains to point out that the wear and tear on the machines as well as the men would leave the combat effectiveness of their units questionable at best. 'One does not simply hop into a tank and go driving about Germany in the dead of winter,' Seydlitz's battalion commander warned the brigade commander, 'without paying a price.'
As they moved along the westbound lane of the autobahn, Seydlitz could see that the price which his commander had warned about was already being paid. At regular intervals on both sides of the autobahn Army trucks of every description, Leopard tanks, Marder infantry fighting vehicles, and self-propelled artillery pieces sat idle, either broken down or out of fuel. In some instances armored vehicles had seized up in mid-stride, coming to a sudden stop in the center of the road. Left by the losing commander for the overwhelmed maintenance teams to recover, the rest of the unit, fighting civilian traffic as well as a tight timetable, would attempt to flow around the derelict vehicle. When road conditions did not permit vehicles following to pass on a paved surface, the other vehicles in the column and dozens of columns following would maneuver off the road, onto the shoulder, and then back onto the autobahn, dragging great trails of mud onto the road surface already made slick by freezing rain or wet snow. During the day, when the temperature rose above freezing, this mud made driving dangerous to any wheeled vehicles. The number of accidents involving German civilians speeding down the autobahn in their cars who unexpectedly hit this mud multiplied as rapidly as the number of broken-down military vehicles increased. At night or when the temperature dipped below freezing, the mud clods on the road froze hard as stone. The effect of hitting a patch of road smeared with these frozen fields of mud in a Mercedes was just as dangerous as it was when the mud was wet and slick. The image of smashed cars and civilian tractor-trailers along the side of the road, with their angry owners shaking their fists and shouting at Seydlitz and his company as they rolled by, did nothing to cheer up his confused and tired command.
As bothersome as this was to Seydlitz, his mind was on other, more pressing military matters. The military police and local authorities would deal with the angry and injured civilians. No one, however, seemed to be too concerned about the welfare of his command. Though he considered himself lucky that he had yet to lose a single tank to a breakdown, Seydlitz knew at this point that it was simply a matter of time before his luck ran out. And if a mechanical failure didn't stop them, lack of fuel would. For, although he had seen many fuel trucks moving about, all of them either belonged to another unit or were on the other side of the road headed in the opposite direction. The battalion's own fuel trucks, drained days ago, had been unable to find a fuel depot where they could top off. Suggestions by several of the company commanders in the battalion that they draw on civilian gas stations or fuel depots were rejected. They had, their battalion commander told them, no authority at that time to do so. That, and the desire to minimize the impact of military operations on the civilians, kept Seydlitz from topping off his tanks from a gas station that was less than one hundred meters from the assembly he had just left.
As if to mock the need to minimize their impact on civilians, Seydlitz's tank rolled by the remains of a bright yellow Porsche. Left on the side of the road, the front left fender was chewed up as though some great metal-eating cat had grabbed the fender and gnawed on it. In an instant Seydlitz knew what had happened. The impatient driver of the Porsche had apparently been following an armored vehicle too closely. Without having seen it, Seydlitz knew that at some point the driver of the armored vehicle had slowed for some reason, causing the Porsche to run into the rotating treads of the armored vehicle. Caught in the treads, the Porsche would be pulled up and into the drive sprocket of the armored vehicle to be ground up. If, like this Porsche, the civilian driver was lucky, the car would be thrown clear of the armored vehicle like a child's toy.
Such accidents, in a country where heavy military equipment shared the roads with everyone else almost on a daily basis, were to be expected. What was new to Seydlitz was the casualness and lack of serious concern with which his superiors and even his own men now treated this rash of incidents. It seemed as if, in the 2nd Panzer Division's rush to get at the Americans, all thought of maintaining the normally close and friendly civilian-military relationships that had highlighted every peacetime maneuver was forgotten. To Seydlitz, this didn't make sense. For rather than doing everything to defend civilians and their property, the civilians were being viewed as a nuisance to military operations. He had actually watched units along the division's route of march going out of their way to infuriate the very people they were supposed to be defending. When Seydlitz mentioned this to his friend Captain Buhle, the battalion supply officer, Buhle shrugged. 'What, Friedrich, do you expect? We're being told to go out and defend those bastards, putting our asses on the line for them. Yet despite the fact that we need every kind of support imaginable, from fuel to rations, we can't requisition anything, not even toilet paper, from the civilians. 'Military operations,' the fools in Berlin tell us, 'cannot be allowed to interfere with the normal daily intercourse of civilian affairs.' Shit, Friedrich, just look at the mess that this division alone is creating and then tell me how in the hell we are going to keep from interfering with normal daily intercourse of civilian affairs. Fools, I tell you! We're being led by fools in the service of ungrateful swine.'
Even the attitude that his superiors seemed to hold concerning the welfare of their own men and equipment during the marching and countermarching of the past few days bothered Seydlitz. For two days he and his company had sat in their assembly area south of Dresden waiting for their resupply of food and fuel to find them. Orders to move, however, found them first. If it were not for the soldiers going off on their own and buying the food themselves, no one in Seydlitz's company would have gotten a hot meal while they waited. Even their combat rations, as Buhle had so painfully pointed out, were running low.
Then, in the midst of bemoaning their fate, Seydlitz recognized the tactical symbol of his brigade on several fuel and supply trucks in the eastbound lane of the autobahn. Despite the orders to remain in radio listening silence, Seydlitz felt the need to inform his commander. Could they not, he asked, flag down the column in which their brigade's trucks were moving in order to refuel and draw rations?
Without any hesitation, his battalion commander informed Seydlitz that they could not. Both the battalion and, no doubt, the brigade's supply vehicles had to adhere to the march tables that controlled the movement of all units in the area. 'If every commander stopped when and where he wanted to,' the battalion commander explained to Seydlitz, 'then this intolerable situation would become totally unmanageable.' Reminding Seydlitz that the march orders they were moving under had a maintenance and refueling stop set up by corps supply units and scheduled in another two hours, the battalion commander went on to reassure Seydlitz that if everyone did what they were ordered to do, everyone would eventually get to where they were going.
Acknowledging his commander, Seydlitz gave up as he watched the trucks carrying the fuel and food his company so desperately needed roll away to the east into the gathering darkness. There was, of course, no fuel and no food waiting for Seydlitz and his company at the end of two hours. The corps supply unit responsible for establishing the refuel and rest stop was still on the road somewhere to the west, tied up behind a broken-down tank and the armored recovery vehicle, also broken down, that had stopped to retrieve it. With fuel almost expended, Seydlitz and his company, as well as the rest of the brigade, would wait, lined up on the side of the road and unable to continue due to a simple lack of fuel. For nearly twelve hours they would wait while staff officers at corps and division desperately shuffled and reshuffled march tables and units without ever realizing that their efforts were for the most part creating more problems than they were solving. It would take the direct intervention of both the corps commander of the 2nd German Corps and his division commanders, riding up and down the route of
