At 1800, just as the companies and teams were settling in for what promised to be a long and brutal night, a downpour that blackened the sky and came in sheets swept through the area. At first it was a welcome relief. After twenty minutes, however, it started to become a hindrance. The engineers who were still digging the antitank ditch and positions found themselves fighting mud as well as time. The tedious job of emplacing the minefield became a miserable one as well. Hastily dug foxholes rapidly filled with water, forcing the occupants to abandon them and seek shelter in the PCs when they could. They were not the only ones who sought shelter in their tracks. Only Delta Company, with the exception of those people working with the engineers in the minefield, was lucky, for it had been able to take up position in the homes and buildings along the eastern edge of Langen. By the time the last shower passed through at 2000 hours, any joy the men in the battalion had felt over the break in the summer heat had been washed away, replaced by muttered complaints about the cold, the damp, and the mud.
The rain did have one beneficial effect. By coming late in the day, it cooled everything that was not generating heat, thus increasing the effectiveness of the thermal sights. The attacking Soviet tanks would show up as clear thermal images against the cool natural backdrop.
With the exception of the engineers who would continue to work until all light was gone, the battalion was set and as ready as it would ever be. All it had to do now was wait. The tank crews, the infantrymen in the town and on the hills, the scouts, the ITV crewmen, the battalion’s heavy mortar men, and the numerous staff and support people that kept the battalion going settled in to wait.
During this interlude Team Yankee, like the rest of the battalion, went to half-manning. The scouts, deployed in the path of any Soviet advance, would be able to give them a good five minutes warning of a pending attack. Uleski took the first watch for the Team while Bannon got some sleep. At first he found staying awake easy. The cold and the damp, coupled with the nervous anticipation kept him alert for the first hour. Boredom and exhaustion, however, soon caught up to him. By 2330 hours he was losing his fight to stay awake and alert. Nothing seemed to be working. Shifting his weight from one foot to another, or shaking himself out made little difference. He even tried slapping his own face. That proved to be just as useless, not to mention painful. Inevitably, no matter how hard he tried, he found he was unable to keep from leaning up against the side of the copula and dropping off to sleep, awakening only when his head fell forward and crashed into the M2 machinegun mount.
Just before midnight, he gave up his efforts and roused his gunner to replace him in the cupola. At the same time, he had the loader replaced the driver. When Gwent was ready, Uleski told him he was going to check the line, wake up the CO, and come back to get some sleep.
As he moved down the line, starting with the Mech Platoon, he was glad to see that the rest of the Team had been able to remain more alert than he had. In the Mech Platoon’s area he ran into Sergeant Polgar, who never seemed to sleep. The only way Uleski was ever able to tell that Polgar was tired was to listen to him speak. His slow southern drawl became noticeably more pronounced when he was exhausted, sounding like an old 45 record being played at 33 RPMs.
At Alpha 66 Uleski found Bannon stretched out on top of the blow-off panels of Alpha 66’s turret asleep. Looking at Bannon nestled in the middle of the tank’s folded camouflage net with the loader’s CVC on and plugged into the loader’s radio control box, Uleski was at first reluctant to wake him. To have left him alone, even for a little while longer, would have been kind, but ill advised. One of them needed to be awake and alert at all times. Uleski waited until Bannon was fully awake and coherent before he began to updated him on the status of the Team and the current situation. This did not take long, as there was little that had changed in the past few hours. Nothing had come over the battalion or team radio nets since radio listening silence had gone into effect. All was quiet.
Bannon was about to tell his XO to go back to his tank and get some rest when a thunderous volley of artillery slammed into Langen and in the saddle between the hill the Team was on and the one just east side it. The flash from the impacts lit up the sky. Division and brigade had been right. The Soviets were coming through the gap.
The men of the Mech Platoon scrambled into their positions as the Soviet artillery continued to crash into the far side of the hill they were on. The water in their foxholes had long since dissipated, but the mud had not. Wherever the infantrymen made contact with the ground, the mud clung to their boots. The added weight, leaving them with the feeling their boots were made of lead rather than leather, slowed them, but not by much as adrenalin and the advent of battle spurred on even the slowest of Polgar’s troops.
No one needed to tell them what they needed to do. Riflemen checked their magazines, tapping them against their helmets to ensure that the rounds were properly seated before they loaded their weapons, chambered a round, took their weapons off safe, and placed the barrel on the stake placed along their principal direction of fire. Grenadiers checked the function of their grenade launchers and chambered their first rounds. Machinegunners checked the ammo to ensure that it was clean, dry, and ready to feed. Dragon gunners switched on their thermal sights, checked their systems, and began to scan their areas for targets.
As they were doing so, Polgar trooped the line, stopping at each foxhole, to give each soldier his final instructions, make any corrections that were needed, or offer up a word of encouragement. When he came to a squad leader, he had him to repeat his orders. The image of their platoon leader, illuminated by the flashes from impacting artillery, squatting above their foxhole as he calmly gave them instructions, served to steady rattled nerves and calm fears. His confident and businesslike manner was contagious, binding the platoon into a usable weapon.
The tankers also prepared for their ordeal with a greater sense of urgency, for if the coming battle played out as their commanding officer expected it to, its outcome would be determined by them. The ITVs and the Scout Platoon, firing their TOW antitank guided missiles, and the infantry with their Dragons would contribute. In a battle against a superior and determined foe, every weapon that could be brought to bear counted. In a tank-on-tank engagement, however, the fast-firing M68A1 105mm tank cannon, capable of firing up eight aimed rounds per minute, would decide the issue.
A tank and its crew has but one reason to exist. To maneuver the tank’s cannon to a position where it could do the most damage and feed it once it was there. All else takes a distant second. Loaders checked the ammo stored in the turret’s ready rack to ensure that the rounds were placed in the order they would be needed. Since they would be fighting tanks tonight, the majority of the rounds fired would be the armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding SABOT rounds with their long needle-like projectiles. When the loaders were satisfied that the proper ammo was readily at hand, they closed the heavy armored doors that separated the crew from the ammo in the ready rack and checked that the turret floor was clear. In the heat of battle, it would not do to have things clutter the turret. The spent shell casings spewed out onto the turret floor after the main gun fired, rattling and rolling around at his feet, would be more than enough of a challenge to the loader.