To the south, the 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions carried out a simultaneous assault of both ends of the A15 autobahn bridge where it crossed the Spee on the edge of the town.
Being over a hundred miles from the fighting, the reservists protecting the bridge had mounted only a small guard whilst the remainder slept. They were all men in their forties, recalled after twenty years of civilian life and given the minimum of refresher training. The Belgians took out the sentries without a sound before moving on the trenches and fighting vehicles occupied by sleeping reservists. It wasn’t a completely bloodless victory; apart from the sentries, three other members of the bridge guard fell to silenced rounds or cheese wire garrottes.
With the bridge secure the Belgian Paratroopers’ 3rd Battalion, less its mortar platoon, remained on the eastern bank whilst the engineers prepared the bridge for demolition, and the 3rd Lanciers special forces company, 1’ere Compagnie d’Equipes Specialisee de Reconnaissance mounted their jeeps and went north into the town.
Bad Roulen has two rail lines which enter it and join at a small marshalling yard on the western side of the river. The bridges that carry the railway lines lie at either end of the town park on the eastern bank.
The town fathers had been working hard over the past few years to undo the damage the communists had done by industrialising the city and ignoring environmental controls. The riverside park had been cleaned up, landscaped and beautified, but the heavily polluted river still had a long way to go. The park had become a tented city housing the lower ranks of the two companies garrisoning the town, and it was the job of the jeep company to prevent them from interfering by causing chaos and mayhem, whilst securing the railway bridges.
By the time the jeep company reached the first rail bridge the alarm had been raised by the airbase, not by radio but by landline as the Belgians carried portable jamming sets that flooded their known frequencies with silent noise, a means of cutting communications without alerting the victims.
The commander of the jeep company watched through a night scope as an officer emerged from a sandbagged CP and listened for the sound of gunfire before hurriedly pulling on his fighting order as he ran to rouse his men.
Before the running officer could reach the park a jeep had drawn level with him and a well-aimed blow across the back of his neck with an entrenching tool sent him tumbling. The jeeps raced for the bridge, cutting down the sentries at the western end and driving across, the vehicles bucking wildly on railway sleepers. The sentries on the eastern bank shared the same fate as their mates on the opposite side, and the bridge was in Belgian hands.
A jeep and its crew equipped with 40mm Mk-19 automatic grenade launchers were left to secure either end of the bridge, along with a Milan equipped vehicle. Two of the company’s snipers found themselves spots where they could best observe the tented area in the park whilst the drivers set up GPMGs. Once he was satisfied his men were in position the Belgian company commander established radio communications with the brigades mortar line, and then settled down to wait for the Engineers to blown the autobahn.
Dropping the solidly built bridge into the Spee wasn’t a particularly scientific event, but the engineers were not looking for marks for grace and artistic interpretation. Cratering charges had been laid on the on-ramps for good measure and when the spans were dropped the ramps were wrecked also.
The roar of the demolition charges reverberated upriver and on hearing it the seven remaining jeeps entered the park in column and accelerated down the main ‘street’ of the tented area, firing into the canvas structures as they went.
The sound of the autobahn bridge being destroyed had brought men stumbling from the tents into the darkness. They could hear the sound of speeding vehicles but the blackout was in force and they were unaware that NATO troops were amongst them until the jeeps opened fire.
As the jeeps cleared the tented area the commander called for mortar fire on the centre of the park, and the Belgian’s on the first railway bridge opened fire. Anyone the snipers saw who appeared to be attempting to establish command and control were singled out and despatched, whilst the grenadiers and ‘gimpy’ gunners began expending rounds as fast as they could fire.
Before the smoke had chance to settle the paratroops to the south were seeding the area with booby-traps and moving north to their next objective. It is far easier to take a bridge by assaulting both ends at once hence the 3rd Battalion remained on the eastern bank. Apart from the two railway bridges there were four road bridges spanning the river within the town limits, hence the 3rd Battalion had remained on the eastern bank.
On the northern edge of the town park the jeep company met its first real opposition. The company commander elected to take the second railway bridge in the same fashion as they had taken the first; using the speed of the vehicles and the firepower they carried to best advantage.
The previous rail bridge had been at street level with barriers to stop traffic whenever a train was due, however the second bridge was raised above street level, crossing 29° above the Spee and the streets running beside it. Access for maintenance vehicles to the top of the steep embankment at the eastern end was via a ramp behind a row of buildings, with a tight turn at the top before a narrow gateway.
The jamming that had blinded the air defences to the presence of troop carrying transports had dissipated with the departing E-2C Hawkeye that had accompanied them. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence for NATO deep strikes to venture out this far and the AAA detachment had learnt by experience that trying to burn through the interference only earned you an anti-radiation missile for your troubles. So the radars had been switched off until the crews were certain that neither they nor the town had been the NATO aircrafts’ target.
The sounds of the autobahn being dropped and the attack on the park alerted the detachment that a ground assault was in progress. They attempted to broadcast an alert by radio but when this failed the crews buttoned up their vehicles, and the ZSUs lowered their quad barrels to the anti-infantry position.
The ZSU, or ‘Zeus’, mounted as it was on a PT-76 amphibious tank chassis was as deadly to infantry and light armour as it was to rotary and fixed wing aircraft. Each of its four 23mm water-cooled cannons fired mixed belts of explosive, fragmentation and armour piercing tracer rounds at a rate of 1000 rounds a minute from a high speed, hydraulically stabilised armoured turret, making it very accurate and very hard to kill without anti-armour weapons.
Bad Roulen had two AAA detachments assigned to its sector, one at the airbase and one covering the rail junction and marshalling yards where the coverage there encompassed the autobahn bridge also. Both detachments were standard in size and equipment, four ZSU-23-4s and four mobile SA-9 Gaskin launchers in each to provide short and medium range cover.
As the first Belgian jeep appeared at the top of the embankment there was one seconds worth of ear splitting cacophony as it was engaged and reduced to jagged scrap by a ZSU that had driven out onto the tracks at the western end of the bridge. It was guarding against just such an eventuality using its night sight to watch for any enemy approach. The jeep had not quite cleared the gateway so it was now blocking the way for the remainder, and as it began to burn it illuminated the remaining jeeps which were nose to tail on a narrow ramp with no hope of getting past.
The sentries on the bridge were not equipped with night viewing devices and although they heard the Belgian vehicles rushing up the ramp, they leant across the stone parapet beyond the bridge and were able to identify them by the light from the burning jeep reflected off the buildings backing onto the embankment. The stalled line of vehicles in flickering light, were then taken under fire by the sentries. A second jeep was lost in the act of reversing back down the incline when its driver was hit and lost control. The vehicle veered off the narrow ramp and rolled down the side of the embankment, spilling out its occupants as it went.