He took a long look at the faces in the room.
“These people we are about to take on are good, but we’ve fought ‘em before and had the situation not altered in Poland we’d have taken them at Leipzig.”
A twelve-foot square area of the cellar floor between the commanding officer of 1CG and the seated sub unit commanders contained a model of Wuitterlingen and the surrounds, courtesy of Sgt Osgood. Wine bottles representing individual buildings made it seem that the place was wall to wall churches, but it was the location and position that was important, not the aesthetic effect. The positions of the buildings, roads and paths was known from aerial photos and maps, but Oz had discovered many of the enemy fighting positions and estimated enemy numbers at roughly forty strong. The lack of patrolling by the enemy bore out the fact that they were loath to spend men and ammunition in patrol actions.
Small country lanes to the west that served outlying farm’s converged together on a small road that ran into the village as its single street, meeting a larger road and forming a T-junction at the villages eastern end. The village contained a bar, a small shop and a Lutheran church; the other twenty buildings were all houses. To the best of their knowledge NATO believed that all the lawful occupants had been forced out by the Russians and had walked to the town to the north, which was still in NATO hands.
“In our first objective, Wuitterlingen, I expect a short hard fight, but once we have taken it we go straight into the advance… and we do not know how many or where the enemy are between Wuitterlingen and Helmstedt, so we could have a hard time of it. We do know the enemy came in with shed loads of anti-tank weapons, so after taking the village the advance will be on foot, one up, two back and only calling on the tanks and APCs for direct fire support.” There were groans from the infantrymen and one company commander held up his hand.
“Captain Llewellyn… I am several pay grades above you and I have made the decision, so unless you are merely asking permission to go to the loo, put your hand down. This battalion defends democracy… it does not necessarily practice it.” Captain Llewellyn’s hand disappeared.
“I fully appreciate how the thought of a leg advance must seem, especially as we have so many armoured fighting vehicles at hand… and as I sit in my vehicle far behind you… with the heater on of course… my thoughts will be with you and your blisters.” He grinned evilly at the Coldstream Guardsmen and the 82nd’s Paratroopers for a second, letting the words settle before getting to the real meat of the orders group, how they were going to do it.
After such ‘luxuries’ as central heating and double-glazing, the house the three awoke in seemed like an icebox by comparison. There were four bedrooms with low ceilings but each held a bed almost large enough to qualify as a double. Patricia and Caroline had found the weight of blankets necessary to ensure a night of sleep untroubled by frozen extremities, was almost suffocating.
The previous day had been spent sleeping for the large part, whilst the wife of the old man bustled about the house, doing her chores and keeping watch.
Once they had slept there were hours to kill and little to occupy them. There was no TV and only an ancient radio set, which required five minutes for the valves to warm up before anything could be heard. Svetlana kept the radio on one station, listening carefully for a combination of folk songs that she alone knew. Patricia helped the old woman with the cooking and cleaning, which left Caroline at a loose end so she wandered the house until she came upon the old man in a back room, cleaning an old, but serviceable rifle. He seemed happy to have the company of a pretty young woman with whom to practice rusty English on as she helped him. He was proud of the weapon, and taking out a wooden box he opened it and removed a brass telescopic sight, explaining how he had been a sniper on the border with China during his service. Once the weapon had been cleaned and reassembled he showed the pilot how to handle it, and its weight came as a surprise to her, but he explained how a light weapon was unsuitable for accuracy at long range.
The day dragged on and Svetlana stayed close to the radio set, even at mealtimes.
The assault upon the village had begun two hours before dawn, and the outlying enemy fighting positions were taken out one by one, the last one being overrun before the first rays of daylight had appeared, by soldiers who had trained to fight at night as a matter of course.
The buildings posed a different tactical problem for the battalion, because FIBUA, or fighting-in-built-up-areas as it is known, is an art all of its own. To the uneducated it would seem to be a small matter to merely shell the place flat, but as had been shown at places such as Monte Casino, a surprising number not only survive, but find themselves with all the material to cobble together defensive positions, lying there ready to use.
Good command and control of ones men went without saying, as was communications and a good stock of small arms ammunition and grenades, but the essential ingredient without which house clearing could not hope to work, was momentum. Get the enemy back peddling, and keep them like that and you have wrested the initiative from them. According to the book, the correct way to clear a house is from the top down, and no doubt the author had a stack of grappling irons lying around when he put pen to paper. In the real world detached buildings were taken from the ground upwards, and only in the case of terraced streets could ‘the book’ be adhered to, once the first building had been taken the hard way of course. One reason why it is easier to go from the roof to the ground may seem obvious, it is gravity. Isaac Newton wasn’t thinking about house clearing and FIBUA when he discovered the existence of gravity, or he may possibly have made mention of the problems inherent with tossing hand grenades up stairs.
The technique for countering the possibility of your grenade being kicked back or rebounding off objects, to bounce back down the stairs to you, is to release the spring arm and count off two seconds, which is half the fuse time, before tossing it. It makes for just another of those character-defining moments that make life in the infantry so rich and interesting.
The crack of random rounds as they passed overhead punctuated the industrious chiselling away of bayonets behind a field wall. CSM Probert had been preparing ‘mouse hole charges’, each constructed of two, roughly three foot lengths of wood strapped together to form an ‘x’. A quarter pound of PE-4 was attached to each of the two arms that would be upper most, and into these had been pushed detonators, after equal lengths of fuse had been crimped into the detonators open ends. Colin had four riflemen, all with grenade launchers, two gun groups, and the platoons air defence section, now in the rifle role but missiles close to hand, preparing a point of fire behind the old stone wall at one end of Weferlingen’s single street. The men were working up a sweat, using bayonets to remove the cement from between the bricks to make firing loops in the thick, ten foot high wall; well at least ten of them were, anyway.