While he was unhappy that his motorized rifle battalion was being diverted from the main effort of the army, Potecknov rationalized that it was for the better. His troops were still untried by battle. So far all they’d done since the commencement of hostilities was follow the division’s lead, waiting for the chance to pour through a breach in the American lines that never came. By sweeping up the enemy force at Arnsdorf, the colonel could blood his troops. A cheap victory would not only instill confidence in the officers and men of his battalion, it would provide him with an opportunity to see how well those officers performed under fire. This would be nothing more than a live-fire exercise with a few targets that fired back.
With Team Yankee’s leadership assembled, Bannon went over their current situation, what he expected the enemy would do, and how they were going to hold Hill 214. They didn’t have a lot to work with. What they did have had to be stretched to cover threats from any direction. The result was not the soundest plan he had ever come up with, for it violated just about every tactical principle in the book. But, given the situation and time, it was the best he could do. Once the orders were out, the Team began to deploy and dig in.
The tanks still constituted their major firepower. Initially, they would fight from their present positions, which would allow them to parry an attack from Arnsdorf. They also needed to be ready to occupy two other positions in case the Soviets attacked elsewhere. The first was on the eastern side of the woods covering the open space between Hill 214 and a wooded lot to the southeast. A Soviet commander could use those woods as a staging area before rushing across the open area and onto Hill 214. The second position was on the crest of Hill 214 facing south. The Soviet’s might decide to seal off the Team’s routes of escape, then hit it from that direction.
The Mech Platoon was broken up into three elements. The two rifle squads dismounted and established an ambush along a north-south trail that ran through the center of the woods north of Hill 214. This protected the Team from a dismounted attack coming through the woods from the north, provided the Soviet commander making that attack used the trail to guide on. The two PCs with only the drivers and track commanders under Uleski established an outpost on the crest of Hill 214 covering the southern portion of the hill. The third element was a two-man OP on the east side of the woods watching the southeast wooded lot. Bannon hoped that if the Soviets came from the south or from the east, that OP and one manned by the tanks would be able to give the tanks sufficient warning and time to switch to the alternate positions.
It was the attack through the woods from the north that was, in Bannon’s mind, the greatest threat. Polgar had a total of thirteen men to cover that area. This number included Folk and Kelp, for there were no vacant slots due to casualties on the tanks they needed to fill. The distance from the west edge to the east edge of the wooded lot was just a little over one thousand meters. With two men per foxhole and ten meters between foxholes, the most Polgar could cover was sixty meters. That left a very large gap on either side that the Soviet commander could move whole companies through, if he knew where Polgar’s people were. In all likelihood, however, a commander conducting a night attack through unfamiliar woods would stick to or near the trail, if for no other reason than to maintain orientation. If that happened, Polgar was ready and waiting with one of their Dragons, two M60 machineguns, two grenade launchers, and his riflemen. To provide an additional edge, antitank and antipersonnel mines, as well as field expedient booby traps using grenades, were deployed to the front and flanks of the infantry positions.
Command and control of the Team would be simple. First, there wasn’t that much to command or control. Second, all radios were put on the company net. Bannon took over Alpha 55, the XO’s tank and stayed with the tanks. With his arm injured, Uleski could not fight 55. Besides, Bannon wanted someone dependable with the PCs covering the south. After the run-in with the T-62s in the morning, he was paranoid about the southern side of Hill 214. An OP sent out to the front of the tanks and manned by two crewmen who had a sound-powered phone running back to 55 would be able to pass information straight back to Bannon. The OP on the east side was also using sound-powered phones to maintain contact. Their phone line ran back to Polgar who, in turn, maintained contact with Bannon via a portable PRC-77 radio on the Team net. With the exception of Polgar, who had to run his dismounted infantry using voice commands, everyone in the Team could contact everyone else.
The afternoon passed in a strange and unnerving silence. The distant rumble of artillery hitting someone else had become so common that unless an effort was made, no one noticed it anymore. That didn’t mean anyone was becoming lax or blasé. Everyone was nervous and on edge. At the slightest sound or movement out of the ordinary, the men would stop work and grab their weapons. Since the war had begun no one in the Team had had much of a chance for a decent, uninterrupted sleep. In the last thirty-six hours, Bannon had had no more than two hours of sleep total.
While it was noticeable on everyone, this lack of sleep had its most telling effect on him and his leaders. Because of this, Bannon found he often had to repeat his orders to them two or three times. When the orders were being issued for the defense of Hill 214, one of the tank commanders had actually fallen asleep. Uleski wasn’t in much better shape. As he was telling the men who would be with him what they needed to do preparations, he stopped in mid-sentence, unable to remember what he had intended to say next. The only way Bannon kept going was by constantly moving around. Even then, he sometimes had to stop and try hard to remember what it was he had been doing. It didn’t take long for Bannon to realize the Team could not go on like this for much longer. Unless something changed real soon, by tomorrow, he reasoned, they would be at the end of their ability to endure and function.
As he was going over this in his mind, he decided, despite his previous resolve, that if they had no contact with anyone from battalion or brigade by 0300 the following morning, he would take Team Yankee off Hill 214 and, under the cover of darkness, reenter friendly lines to the south. If someone was coming, they would be there by then. To try and hold on for another day would stretch those who were with him on Hill 214 beyond their physical capability. He could only ask so much of the men.
It was during the last hour of daylight that the Russians came.
It began when a column of four T-72s and eight BTR-60PBs rolled down the road into Arnsdorf from the northwest as if Team Yankee were a thousand miles away. Garger, Hebrock, and Bannon crawled out to the OP manned by the tankers to watch this column as it entered the town. Both its size and its behavior told Bannon they were from a different regiment, possibly even a different division than the Soviet units the Team had overrun that morning. The theory that the Russians had shoved everything forward and had left their flanks flapping in the breeze seemed to be spot on. Their coming from the northwest pointed to the fact that they were either part of the operational reserve, or the Russians were having to strip detachments from front line units in order to secure their rear areas. If the latter were true, then Team Yankee’s attack had achieved some measure of success in that it was causing the Soviets to divert forces from their attack to the west.