The Ten Thousand (61 page)

Even before she had it fully opened, the blast of cold air hit her. It didn’t bother her. Rather, it felt good, refreshing. Pushing on the door, Cole carefully swung her legs out and searched for the running board of the truck. When the toe of her boot found it, she slipped down, turned to face the driver, now stirring, and then closed the door as quietly as she could. When she was sure it was secure, Cole lowered herself to the ground, pulled her parka around her, zipped it up, and flipped the hood up over her head. Though she was sure she looked like something out of a Russian fashion magazine, Cole was warm and well protected from the cold night air.

As she moved over to the shoulder of the road, the pale moonlight allowed her to see the line of trucks that stretched off into the distance almost to a bend in the road. The trucks in front of her hospital’s lead vehicle carried strange boatlike contraptions. An engineer unit, she thought. Had to be. They carried all kinds of unusual stuff like that. In front of the dozen or so engineer trucks at that bend there was an MP humvee parked in the center of the road. A lone MP sat upright manning the M-60 machine gun mounted on top of the humvee’s roof while another MP, bundled up against the cold, slowly walked back and forth across the road in front of the humvee. With his rifle slung over his shoulder, Cole couldn’t tell if he was on guard or waiting for someone and simply walking to and fro to stay warm.

No matter, Cole thought. They knew what they were doing. And she knew what she had to do.

Turning her back on the MPs and the engineers, Cole began to walk toward the first ambulance. In doing so, she missed seeing the lone roving guard freeze in place, listening to a noise in the distance while he unslung his rifle.

Crashing through a series of logging trails and unpaved farm roads some six kilometers northwest of Bad Hersfeld, Seydlitz was beginning to realize that his orders, which seemed so absurdly simple, were becoming harder and harder to carry out. After backing his tanks out of position in pairs, he reassembled his company and began to infiltrate them en masse as he had been ordered. Though his attempts to contact brigade and notify them of his departure went unanswered, Seydlitz didn’t care. He had his orders and he had verified them. Now all he had to do was to carry them out as he saw fit.

Doing so turned out to be almost as nerve-racking as sitting in one place for hours on end waiting to be attacked by enemy ground units or artillery. Fumbling forward into the darkness, Seydlitz’s company managed to avoid contact with any American units. That soon became a problem. The routes into what he thought were the enemy rear areas were totally devoid of any sign of the enemy. It was almost as if the Americans had never existed. Slowly, as he pushed his exhausted company further and further north, he became bolder and bolder, picking up speed and heading for parts of the forests and countryside that looked like good places to set up rear area supply bases and facilities.

Under normal circumstances, Seydlitz’s thinking would have been correct. But these were not normal circumstances for the Tenth Corps. Rather than concerning themselves with setting up and operating, the Tenth Corps’ combat service support units were only concerned with getting out of the trap that the 2nd and 10th Panzer divisions were still trying to close. So instead of hiding in the woods where Seydlitz was hunting, the prey he sought sat in the open, lined up and exposed on the roads as they waited their turn to continue the long march to the sea.

Seydlitz’s decision to leave the woods and begin to move along the roads was not based on any great revelation or protracted decision-making process. Rather, he was tired of screwing with the countless tree branches that slapped at him as his Leopard tank lurched back and forth over the heavily rutted trails now frozen stone hard. To hell with this, he finally said to himself shortly before 3 A.M. With a curt order over the company radio net that was almost a scream, Seydlitz ordered the lead tanks to halt while he took the time to study his map and decide where to go next. Satisfied that he had a good fix on his unit’s location, Seydlitz noted with much joy that there was a hard-surfaced secondary road just a few hundred meters in front of his lead platoon. “There. That is what I want.”

Seydlitz’s gunner, waiting for his commander’s order, thought that Seydlitz was yelling for him. “What is it, Herr Hauptmann? Trouble?”

“No, Ernst. No more trouble. We are going to get out of these damned woods and head east.”

Folding his map, he looked about. “If there are Americans here, then they are the best camouflage artists in the world. We tried as hard as we could. We went north, as ordered, and tried to find the Americans.

Our duty is done. Now it is time to end this insanity.” Keying the radio mike, Seydlitz contacted Sergeant Wihelm Zangler, the platoon leader of Seydlitz’s lead platoon, and ordered him to make a left turn onto the next hard-surfaced road and follow it until they hit the first village. From there they would make their way to the autobahn and then, as per his orders, head east. Humans, even humans who were German soldiers, could only go so far. Seydlitz was reaching his end and suspected that his platoon leaders and tank commanders were collectively nearing theirs too. To continue would be a foolish waste of good men and machines.

Glad to finally be free of the worry of tree branches, the tanks of Zangler’s platoon made the turn onto the hard-surfaced road as ordered and immediately began to pick up speed. Though they should have known better, since this left the tanks further back in the column still in the woods and struggling to reach the road, tired minds never think of everything. So when Zangler’s tank came swinging around the bend and smack into an American military police vehicle sitting in the center of the road, his platoon was alone and instantly in contact. There was no time to think, no time to pull back. Without any hesitation, Zangler ordered his gunner to open fire and passed the word down to the tank commanders in his platoon to close up, follow him, and attack.

Hilary Cole had just reached the rear of the first ambulance when the chatter of machine-gun fire shattered the stillness of the night. Turning toward the sound, Cole watched as a great black lumbering form spewing orange tongues of flame came around the bend in the road and rammed the MP humvee without slowing down. In horror, she watched as the tank’s left track rose ever so slightly onto the MP

vehicle, then slowly crushed it under its full weight before any of the occupants, including the MP manning the machine gun, could escape.

Transfixed by the sight, Cole watched as another tank came up next to the first, which was still in the process of crushing the MP humvee. It slowed when it caught sight of the line of engineer trucks. Hilary watched as the second tank lowered its long menacing main gun, took a second to aim, and then fired on the first target that looked worthy of a tank main-gun round. Its choice of target had been a good one, for the fuel truck sitting near the head of the engineer unit’s column ripped itself apart, sending a huge yellow fireball into the air and lighting the entire length of the column.

Cole, standing little more than a hundred meters from where the fuel truck blew up, could feel the heat of the fireball. As she watched the burning fuel run out from the sides of the ruptured fuel truck onto the road and into the ditch on the side of the road, Cole realized that she was standing on the edge of hell, and there was nothing that she could do about it. Without any further conscious thoughts, without any control of what she was doing, Cole turned and fled into the forest as a third Leopard tank came careening around the bend and began to charge down the road, machine-gunning anything and everyone who stood in its way.

After having done it, Zangler realized that ramming the American humvee hadn’t been a good idea. It had proven to be a little tougher than he had originally thought. Because of his preoccupation with the wreck that had once been a humvee, the two tanks that had come up behind him had passed his. Now looking down the road, he saw them come together, almost hub to hub, and begin to run march down the road, firing as they went. The Leopard tank on the left, with its turret traversed forty-five degrees in that direction, was busy machine-gunning American trucks and personnel at point-blank range with all the machine guns that the tank’s crew could bring to bear. The Leopard on the right was concentrating on trucks and personnel further down the road. Since it had greater range, that tank began to alternate between firing its main gun and its coaxially mounted machine gun. Because the loader was busy feeding the main gun, he couldn’t bring the turret-mounted machine gun into play. Not that it mattered. By the time it had fired its second 120mm high-explosive anti-tank round, the chaos and confusion, not to mention the destruction, were complete.

Unable to lead, and seeing that it was not possible to get around the side of the line of American trucks and run down along the shoulder of the road, Zangler ordered his driver to slow down. Looking to his rear, he saw the fourth tank in his platoon finally come up. With a series of wild motions, Zangler directed the commander of the fourth tank to pull around and come up on the right side of his own tank.

This formed a second pair of vehicles that stretched from one side of the road to the other. Ready, Zangler waved and ordered his own tank and his consort to begin moving down the road, following the first two at a distance of fifty meters and engaging any personnel or vehicles with their machine guns that the first two tanks of his platoon had missed.

The fireball that had marked the destruction of the engineers’ fuel truck was the first indication Seydlitz had that the lead platoon was in contact. He immediately attempted to contact Zangler. His calls went unanswered. Still not on the hard-surfaced road yet, Seydlitz listened to the steady rattle of machine guns, punctuated on occasion by a main gun firing. Frustrated, he ordered his driver to pick up speed and his loader to change the radio frequency of his radio to Zangler’s platoon frequency.

Pulling his head down to avoid the tree branches now wildly whipping over the open hatch above him, Seydlitz listened to Zangler’s radio net for a second. To his surprise, Seydlitz didn’t hear any of the excited chatter or confused orders that one usually hears on a radio during initial contact. Instead the radio was silent. Looking over to his own receiver-transmitter, Seydlitz made sure that it was on and set to the proper frequency. Satisfied that all was in order, Seydlitz keyed the radio and called to Zangler.

“Leo One Five, this is Leo Four Five. What is your situation? Over.”

Zangler responded without a pause. “We’ve run into a column of trucks. An engineer unit, I think.

We’re engaging them now.” Though his voice was calm, his failure to use full call signs or radio procedures told Seydlitz that he was either busy in an engagement or directing his platoon. Since he was already engaging, there was little that Seydlitz could add.

Still he felt that he needed to say something. So Seydlitz rekeyed the radio. “Leo One Five, continue your attack and destroy everything on the road. Repeat, destroy everything on the road. I am coming up with the rest of the unit now. Over.”

With nothing more than a quick “Affirmative,” Zangler accepted his commander’s orders and passed them on down to his tank commanders.

When they came across the red crosses on white backgrounds on vehicles further down the column, Zangler’s tank commanders didn’t hesitate. Why they didn’t was lost in the confusion and panic of the night. For the moment, Zangler’s tank crews had become mindless killing machines. Perhaps they simply looked at the trucks and personnel fleeing from them as nothing more than the enemy, someone to be acquired, engaged, and killed. Perhaps they saw this as an opportunity to repay the bastards who had attacked them the day before with artillery while they had sat buttoned up in their own tanks shitting their pants every time a round detonated nearby and praying that they would live for another minute. Perhaps some even had higher, loftier thoughts such as defending Germany against invaders. Perhaps.

By now Jan was used to listening to Colonel Edward J. Littleton, Jr., U.S. Army, retired. Littleton, located in a separate studio, was explaining the military situation in Germany. Jan, with a well-practiced smile on her face, sat and watched Littleton’s face on a monitor while he explained the situation in central Germany as he saw it from Washington, D.C. Over the tiny earphone hidden in her right ear, the director whispered that they were ready to cut to the live feed from Germany. Excited at being given the chance to cut the pompous ass off, Jan jumped in while Littleton was in mid-sentence. “Excuse me, Colonel, but I’ve just been told that we have a live feed from Bob Manning, our correspondent in Germany.”

With the camera focused on Jan’s face, she leaned forward and with a look of concern spoke to the camera. “Bob? Bob, can you still hear me?” The man she was trying to talk to was Robert J. Manning, a British correspondent who was working for
WNN
. Right now Bob and a camera crew, using a satellite shot, were attempting to give a live feed for Jan’s morning report.

In a flash, as soon as the technicians in the control room had a good clear picture of Bob, the video image was switched from Jan to Bob. “Jan, yes, I’ve got you now, thank you.” Attired in a British Army camouflage smock with a black wool watch cap pulled down over the tops of his ears, it was obvious that Bob was more concerned about life and limb, not to mention protection against the cold, than he was about what his image looked like on the television screen four thousand miles away. The idea of wearing camouflage caught on very quickly when the losses amongst front-line correspondents began to mount.

The bright yellow or international orange jackets and parkas, it seemed, drew far too much fire. The thought that a correspondent would be given special consideration vanished, along with many other illusions about war, as the viciousness and intensity of battle escalated.