Order of Battle (Command and Control Book 3) by David Bruns & J.R. Olson

Author:David Bruns & J.R. Olson [Bruns, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn River Publishing
Published: 2022-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

28

50 kilometers north of Bialystok, Poland

At 0920, Lieutenant Colonel Donat Wozniak gave the order for the tank battalion of the 1st Warsaw Armoured Brigade to pull off onto the shoulder of Route E67 and shut down their engines.

As his driver maneuvered the tank to the side of the road, Wozniak stood tall in the tank commander’s cupola. He turned, shading his eyes from the morning sun, and peered down the line of fifty-eight M1A2 Abrams tanks behind him.

Truly, a magnificent sight, he thought, but they were headed in the wrong direction. The Russians were in Ukraine to the south. His unit was headed north to the border with Lithuania.

All down the line, the 1,500-horsepower gas turbine engines that powered the state-of-the-art tanks shut off, blanketing the forest in silence. In the stillness, he heard the calls of tank crews to one another.

A two-tone siren wailed in the distance, and Wozniak saw flashing lights racing alongside the column. An ambulance. As it approached, the siren ramped up in frequency and intensity, then it passed by in a blare of noise and light.

“Civilian traffic accident, sir?” asked his gunner, looking up from his position inside the turret at Wozniak’s feet.

“Looks like it,” the tank commander replied. He ground his teeth in frustration.

The brigade movement from Bialystok to Suwalki was only 110 kilometers, but it was along civilian roads, most of them two-lane highways like this one. A four-meter-wide tank like the M1A2 took up the entire roadway, and the battalion stretched over two kilometers in length.

Wozniak was glad he was not in charge of coordinating the brigade movement. Even with the Russian threat all over the news, there were local municipalities who objected to the damage the treads of a seventy-ton tank could do to the surface of a macadam highway.

And then there were civilian drivers who seemed to believe that somehow the laws of gross tonnage did not apply to them as they raced past the column in their little cars or tried to dart through crossings.

That’s the price of peace, his father used to say. People forget. They get soft.

Wozniak’s father always seemed ambivalent about the price of peace. As a career military man, he had served as a young conscript in the Soviet Army inside Poland. He’d seen the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact. Dark years for the military of the newly independent Republic of Poland followed, but he persevered. Polish armed forces were accepted into NATO in 1999, leading to a massive internal reorganization.

Wozniak earned a commission in the post-NATO era. It was a good time to be in the military. Spending was high, and the Polish leadership worked hard to bring their military personnel and equipment up to exacting Western standards. The Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland went to an all-volunteer force during that period and were part of the NATO-led Coalition Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Still, Wozniak knew that he could count on one hand the soldiers in his unit that had seen shots fired in anger.

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