“What’s it doing?” Staff Sergeant Vernon asked. He had gone to check on the eastern pointsman, Lance Corporal Tessa Newall.
The only sound now from the airfield was that of metal upon metal from the direction of the crippled T-90.
Staff Vernon was wedged into the gun pit of the 13 Platoon Wessex guys. Even given Tessa’s slight build it was a little snug
in there.
The gun controller was peering through the GPMG’s starlight scope sight.
“An armoured recovery vehicle turned up a while ago and stopped inside the trees. The tank crew probed for more mines, and now the wrecker has come alongside and the mechanics are hitting that thing with ever bigger hammers.”
“Can’t you stop them with this?” he tapped the cold metal of the gimpy’s top cover.
“Take a look for yourself.” The infantryman told the military policeman.
S/Sgt Vernon put his eye to the sight and quickly withdrew it. A BTS-5B tracked recovery vehicle was alongside the tank, and a juicy high value target it made, but the open maw of the T-90s muzzle stared straight back.
“Off-putting, isn’t it?” the gun controller said with a chuckle.
“They are conserving ammunition I reckon, but if we have a blat in their direction we’ll soon know about it. We need something a bit bigger and the LAW80s don’t have the legs.”
“The radios are back up and there is some Italian artillery somewhere. We could give them a go?”
“No one here knows how to call in artillery fire, do you?”
“Yes actually.” The staff sergeant replied. “I wasn’t always a Monkey.”
The map provided the Soviets grid reference and his compass the bearing from his location to the target. Unlike the remaining enemy tanks this one was not tucked in too close to safely call in fire from nine miles away, not without the risk of themselves becoming collateral damage at any rate.
The obvious problem, passing a fire control order in English to an Italian, was happily solved by the US mortar fire direction centre along at TP33 using one of its company’s cooks to translate.
“Hello Mike Three One, Address Group Tango Alpha, this is Quebec One Two Bravo, address group Victor Zulu, relay to Golf One One Delta, address group Foxtrot Yankee, fire mission over?”
“Mike Three One, relay message for Golf One One Delta, address group Foxtrot Yankee, fire mission…send over?”
“Quebec One Two Bravo, fire mission grid five eight nine, zero six seven, direction zero two nine nine, tank and recovery vehicle in the open, neutralise, over.”
“Mike Three One, fire mission grid five eight nine, zero six seven, direction zero two nine nine, tank and recovery vehicle in the open, neutralise, out.”
There followed a delay as the company cook, a chef in a Sicilian restaurant in Bouckville, Mississippi, gave the message via field telephone to a battery commander who hailed from Genoa. Accent wise it was comparable to a resident of Somerset speaking to a Scottish Highlander, but it worked.
“Mike Three One, shot, over.”
“Quebec One Two Bravo, shot, out.”
Almost a minute passed before the US FDC transmitted again.
“Splash, over.”
“Splash, out.”
The three rounds missed by a good hundred metres and there was frantic activity as the crew of the high value asset, the armoured recovery vehicle, hurried to depart.
Calmly, the RMP NCO adjusted the fires and as the recovery vehicle carefully reversed back along the cleared path through the mines it received a near miss. But so did the gun pit as it did not take an Einstein to work out where the spotter was.
“On target, fire for effect!” Vernon shouted as the ground heaved from a sabot round that had already been loaded and ready in the guns breach. It was a far quicker process to fire an existing round than carry out a full unload. The guns twenty two pre-arranged rounds in the automatic loader were not a major task to rearrange but it still meant a delay when even seconds count.
Heavy calibre machine gun and lighter 7.62 rounds tore up the ground.
The GPMG was dismounted by its gunner braving the incoming fire to preserve it from damage, and the occupants of the gun pit huddled down to weather the storm. The next main gun round was HEF, high explosive fragmentation. Never has fifty seven seconds seemed so endless, but with the arrival of the next rounds a 155mm shell struck the engine deck and killed the crew as well as fling the turret twenty feet.
The tank was wrecked and the recovery vehicle was on its side burning.
“So you were an MFC or something, before you transferred to the RMP?” the gun controller asked, re-mounting the GPMG onto its tripod.
“No, that was the first time I ever called in a fire mission, even in practice.”
They all stared at him.
“I was a civilian projectionist, and I showed old 8mm training films to RA army cadets on Tuesday evenings.” The staff sergeant replied.
“Anyway, must be off.”
Echo One Five, the lead Lince with Lorenzo’s tank squadron once again found the unmistakable signs of the Soviet’s passage through the forest. It cut directly across their path where the enemy had turned south.
Lorenzo had them halt as his squadron caught up, and he left his tank to speak to the recce troop’s commander at the young officer’s request.
They squatted beside the muddy and deep indentations created by tank tracks, the rain now starting to turn them into puddles. He did not know what he and the recce troop commander were supposed to gain from the experience. He was in danger of allowing his sense of the ridiculous to take over. Had the young man sampled the mud between finger and thumb before announcing sagely that ‘Long knife pale face’s steel horses pass um thataway, maybe one hour, maybe two’ he would not have been able to stave off the threatening laughter. It was not that he did not realise the seriousness of the situation, but lieutenant colonels get scared too and the human psyche will clutch at humour as a way to release the stress.
Indeed the young man had dipped a finger into the mud and held it for Lorenzo to smell. One of the vehicles was leaking fuel, but he scented petrol, not diesel. The Soviets were growing desperately sort of fuel if they were using the far more flammable petrol in at least some of their fuel tanks. Modern armoured vehicles were designed to run on diesel, although petrol, paraffin or even alcohol would keep them going if push came to shove, but at a cost. Crew and vehicle survivability was greatly reduced. Not for nothing had the petrol engined Sherman tanks of the previous war been nickname ‘Tommy Cookers’ by the German troops.
Echo One Two had its engine switched off but it coasted downhill, its driver controlling the speed with the vehicles handbrake so as not to have brake lights reveal its presence.
The Lince thermal scanners found nothing untoward between TP33 and the current position, four miles from Braunschweig airfield.
At the next truck stop, set on a slope cut into the forest, the downward incline of the autobahn ceased and the Lince engine restarted.
The absence of the enemy was perplexing. Somewhere out there was more armour of the Soviet’s 91st Tank Regiment, and it had apparently come from blocking positions in the Lehre valley but now had vanished. Had they given up on the idea? If so, then why had they not appeared at the next TP where autobahn 2 crossed the canal?
Set just back in the sodden treeline behind the truck stop, a ZSU-23-4 reported the Italian recce vehicles passage. Completely reliant on battery power to operate its radios and muscle power to hand-crank the turret if necessary at that moment, the anti-aircraft artillery vehicle had escaped detection due to its lack of residual heat despite having been in situ less than thirty minutes. The vehicles refrigeration unit was hardly a requirement for the current area and weather the vehicle was now experiencing, and it was not an intentional stealthy addition to its manufacture either. 91st Tank was part of the Constanta garrison on the Black Sea coast, the ‘Florida’ of Eastern Europe, where high temperatures required specialist solutions for vehicles such as the Zeus. The ZSU-23-4 was a complex piece of machinery and notorious for overheating, even at the other climatic extreme on the often frigid Barents Sea coast. The engine overheated when stationary, as did the electrical systems, causing a shutdown, and it was therefore an operational necessity that the refrigeration unit be added to the Black Sea region units. The crew were aware of the unintended benefits to concealment even if the manufacturer at Mytishchi had not been.