Red Metal

CHAPTER 45

Polish president Konrad Zielinski made the decision unilaterally and knew it would make him, for the majority of the population of his nation, the most despised man in Poland.

But the calculation was not hard for him. He would not—could not — allow the Russians to kill, maim, and destroy their way across his country, then just return home in peace.

Like nothing had happened.

No. There would be repercussions. Despite the cease-fire NATO had declared, Poland would attack the Russian column with everything they had.

Unilaterally.

He knew the Polish armed forces did not have enough firepower to destroy the Russian invaders; there was too much Russian airpower to protect the column, they were moving too fast, and the Russian forces on the ground were too well equipped, too well trained. The surprise against his Polish Land Forces had been too complete. But the president felt his military had to try to deliver the hard lesson to Moscow that there would be a price to be paid for any invasion of its neighbor.

And it was abundantly clear to President Zielinski that the Poles would have to do this themselves. NATO did not support them. They would not help them, and had negotiated the Russian assault forces a clear withdrawal, almost as if Poland were just some middle ground for other, bigger countries to bargain over and transit at will.

No, not again. Russia would learn something of Poland’s strength, and NATO would as well.

A meeting was called and the generals arrived quickly and quietly at the Ministry of National Defense on Klonowa Street in central Warsaw. President Zielinski himself came to the meeting, the lone man in the room out of uniform, and after a brief but impassioned speech harkening to World War II and the Polish history of agonies and wrongs from Russia, he sat down at a chair behind the officers.

The officers next talked over the military options, and the immediate consensus was that there were precious few. The lieutenant general who commanded the Polish Land Forces admitted he was firmly against an attack. These Russians were exiting Germany of their own accord, under an umbrella of peace, and it was assumed they’d file back quickly through Poland and end this affair. The general of the Polish air force agreed. He’d lost a sizable portion of his most advanced aircraft during the Russian lightning raid two days earlier. A coordinated and concerted Polish attack on the Russian invaders with what he had left would be very hard to pull off. The military term was “penny packeting a response”—cobbling together a mishmash of forces on an unknown timeline. It was likely he would only lose more of his air force in another round of fighting and all but invite future threats into Poland when the Russians realized Polish air had been so badly degraded.

And what would the repercussions be from NATO if Poland violated the cease-fire? The PLF might take a few bites out of the raid force, but if there was no NATO to support them after the initial attack, what more might come over the Belarusian border? This threat was real and the stakes were nothing less than the very existence of Poland.

Some sort of surprise attack was the only hope for, if not parity on the battlefield, then at least a fighting chance for the Poles to strike a solid blow, to damage this raid force without destroying their nation in the bargain.

But the Polish Land Forces could not plan on any surprise, because there was no way they could move into position to cut off the Russian armor without the Russians knowing about it from their intelligence collection. It was assumed spies and drones had poured over the border with the raid. In the past two days multiple shoot-outs and killings had taken place in and around train stations in the southern part of the nation, and bodies of dead fighting-age males in civilian clothes and carrying Russian weapons had been recovered.

The officers stood around a table and looked over maps of their nation. It was clear that the easiest, quickest, and smartest move for Sabaneyev to make would be to roll his force back across Poland along the major highways that passed closest to his original invasion route. If he did this, he’d be back in the safety of Belarus before nightfall of the following day. The flat farmland around the motorways and almost completely rural landscape would make the possibility of any ambush by the Poles remote and ill advised. Even by air they would be forced to play by Russian rules.

The generals were getting nowhere with their attack plan, and President Zielinski was becoming visibly irritated, when a colonel in Wojska Specjalne, the Polish special forces, spoke up. He pointed out that even though the motorways wouldn’t take Sabaneyev through any urban areas, there were two major cities close to his assumed return route: Wrocław and Kraków. One of these cities, he suggested, could hide an irregular force with SF support that just might be able to avoid detection by the Russians until the column was too close to avoid rolling into a trap.

A general in the mechanized cavalry dismissed the idea brusquely, saying no force of any size would be able to get out of the city and into fighting positions along the motorway before the well-defended Russian column could destroy it, even if the motorway skirted right alongside the urban center itself.

But the Wojska Specjalne colonel boldly pushed back and offered up a plan that, at first blush, left some of the officers in the room questioning which side of the fight he was on.

“We have to trick the Russians. We have to let them think they’ve gotten what they want. We have to let them do what Russians do best… believe too much in their superiority.

“They are set up for sleek, fast-paced-maneuver warfare. They have enough tricks to fight back against everything we’ve got. So we place them where they should not be. We mire them in a city.” He paused and saw confused faces looking back.

“And then what?” asked the cavalry general. “We fight a battle with Russian armor in the congested, civilian-filled streets of Kraków or Wrocław?”

The colonel nodded solemnly. “Tak.” (“Yes.”)

The room was silent for several seconds. And then President Zielinski said, “Colonel… you have the floor. Lay out the full plan. No great speeches, now. How does this work?”

The colonel turned to Zielinski. “Mr. President, please understand. I believe an attack will be successful in damaging the Russian wheeled force, ideally down to the last man, but it will be similarly devastating to the population centers. You have two choices, Kraków or Wrocław. From the map it appears they would both be well suited for my idea.”

The president knew what was being asked of him. He needed to choose which city would live and which would die.

He thought it over, but not for long. He had spent the last two days steeling himself to lead his nation in war. He had forced out his old mind-set, removed compassion and care for anything other than battle.

His calculation was made dispassionately but with a slight nod to potential civilian casualties.

“Kraków is the second largest city in Poland. Wrocław is the fourth. If we fight in a city… we fight in Wrocław.”

A quick call was made and an orderly brought a detailed map of the city, which was unfurled, and after another hour of discussion, the outline of the colonel’s plan was set.

The Polish Land Forces would move elements of the 12th Mechanized Division, the 18th Reconnaissance Regiment, and the 10th Armored Cavalry Brigade into Sabaneyev’s assumed route along the A8 Motorway that ringed the city of Wrocław to the north. This would be a force of roughly 5,000 troops, and steps would be taken to mask the movements of these men and their equipment. These steps would fail, of course; the Russians would identify the rushed buildup.

To Sabaneyev, it would appear as if the Poles were planning a massive ambush.

If the Poles did, in fact, fight in the fields along the motorway, they would lose in a rout. But the Russians would trust the intelligence reports, and they would expect a day’s delay, and sizable losses of their own.

But the colonel’s plan was not to put the Polish Land Forces north of Wrocław so that they could fight the Russians. No, it was to put the Polish Land Force north of Wrocław to force the Russians to take another route — to take them out of tank country, the open fields of Poland, and into infantry country, special forces country.

The city.

So far everything Sabaneyev had done had been to avoid a pitched fight with frontline Polish, American, and German army troops, to use speed and maneuverability to bypass his enemies’ strengths and to look for weaknesses. To search for gaps and move — fast.

The Poles would use this tendency against him.

The officers in the Ministry of National Defense building agreed with the Wojska Specjalne colonel when he postulated this would continue on the column’s inevitable eastern return. A large enough Polish force arrayed in front of Sabaneyev might get the Russian colonel general to seek an alternate route.

He could turn north, but this would push him into the interior of the nation, not the open, flat south, and it would force him to pass close to the bulk of the Polish military, which was still arrayed near Warsaw awaiting what they assumed would be the main invasion force from Belarus. It would send him near several Polish air force bases, which would decrease the time his column and his air support would have to respond to any threats from the air.

Heading north would both slow him down and expose him to more danger. He wouldn’t do that.

But there was another maneuver Sabaneyev could make to avoid the direct encounter with the Polish Land Forces. He could bypass the 5,000 soldiers dug in in front of him along the motorway, peel off into the streets of Wrocław, and drive right through the city itself. In this way he would be delayed no more than four to six hours, not twelve to twenty-four; he could re-form his column on the A8 Motorway on the other side of the dug-in Polish positions; and he could once again race across poorly defended southern Poland and make his way into Belarus.

If there was nothing but Polish civilian militia defending Wrocław, he would see the way as clear and would be drawn by the opportunity to strike a quick blow against a token force.

Sabaneyev would not take the decision to move through Wrocław lightly. No military force, mechanized or otherwise, wants to get bogged down in a major city with tight streets, civilian traffic, and high buildings on all sides, but if the way through the city looked easier and more assured than the way around the city, the Polish special forces colonel suggested that the brash and confident General Eduard Sabaneyev would choose this route.

Sabaneyev would surely send reconnaissance to look for evidence of traps in Wrocław; to check the bridges over the Oder River, which ran through the city, to ensure they had not been wired with explosives; and to gauge the citizenry for evidence the civilians had been moved out or warned.

But if he found no evidence of major conventional forces positions, he’d almost assuredly take the risk.

And if Sabaneyev could be steered into moving his armor directly through Wrocław, they would trap him in the spot that armor and in fact all conventional forces in the modern age detested and dreaded: fighting street to street, house to house. They would litter his route with a relatively small force of Wojska Specjalne, perhaps four hundred strong, augmented by a few thousand militiamen and — women in civilian clothes. They would make Sabaneyev pay for every block with an armored personnel carrier, every street with a tank, every kilometer with a company of dead Russian soldiers.

The Russian drones wouldn’t pick up a few hundred men and women moving in small groups into Poland’s fourth-largest city over the next twelve hours, and if anyone was tracking the militias, the fact that a couple thousand of their personnel moved along with their old, outdated equipment into the city would just look like a repositioning, moving the B team out of the way of the egressing Russian army, so the PLF could execute their ambush.

When the plan was put forward, there was arguing on all sides, especially when it became clear there would be no way to both preserve the element of surprise and evacuate the city. The historic old town, one of Europe’s most beautiful, would be ground zero for some of the most intense fighting on the Continent since the Second World War.

The Polish people of Wrocław were clearly going to suffer.

But President Zielinski had urged the military men to give him something that would work, damn the costs, and it looked like they had.

The key to the attack would be the simultaneous destruction of the five bridges over the Oder River in the center of town. They would need to be dropped to force the Russians along a path of the Poles’ choosing.

And this would have to happen without the Poles mining the bridges and therefore revealing the ambush to Russian forward reconnaissance troops.

An air force general solved this equation. After conferring with junior officers, he said a dozen of the nation’s thirty-four remaining F-16 aircraft could take off and deliver bombs directly onto the bridges, and even though the inbound aircraft would be detected by the Russians, if the fighters took off from the 32nd Tactical Air Base at nearby Łask, the Russians would have little time to knock them out of the sky before they dropped their payloads and turned away.

The F-16s could then, with luck, retreat back out of the Russian column’s air defense cone, up into the north of the nation, rearm with more bombs, and return for more action — not in the city itself, but on any targets of opportunity at the rear of the column that managed to escape the trap.

The Polish president knew hundreds — no… thousands — of his citizens would die in the carnage and confusion of city fighting, and he would forever be the one who had condemned them to this fate. But ultimately he decided his very nation would not long stand if the Russians believed they could invade Poland without consequences.

He was the one who would stick out his political neck and be sacked if not hanged by his own countrymen when it was all done. But as far as the president was concerned, it was NATO that had condemned the city of Wrocław to destruction by forcing his hand.

The president signed off on the plan, signed away his political career and legacy, signed the death certificates of an unknown number of his citizens and military.

He himself had friends and family in the city, but he did not pick up the phone to tell them to get out. He instead returned to the Presidential Palace, the seat of the brief Polish breakaway from Russia in 1918, itself a symbol of Polish pride and independence in their first attempts at democracy before once more falling under the boots of Russia and Germany. He picked up a hot coffee from the blissfully ignorant secretary in his outer office. He entered and sat down in the old, heavy leather chair.

The December morning sun glared through the huge floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the old palace. Out front he could see the tall, prominent statue of Prince Józef Antoni Poniatowski mounted on his horse, his saber drawn, frozen in bronze in a perpetual cavalry charge. Outside were the lush gardens, green in summer, their joy diminished by the winter’s harsh cold and brown colors.

Beyond the statue he could make out the top of the tomb of the unknown soldier, with earth from every Polish battlefield in large stone urns, and the barely visible gates to the eternal flame.

He realized for the first time that the tomb was placed there to remind all Polish presidents past and future of their precise duties in times like these.

A great dread washed over him.

He thought of the men and women down south, the soldiers and civilians who were about to die, and he thought about the beautiful city he had doomed so that Poland itself might survive.

He quietly put his head down on the huge wooden desk and wept uncontrollably.