Chapter 01 - Włochy (Introduction)
Dombrovsky checks the air waves, there is indeed powerful chatter all around but all of it seems in code. Most of the voices seem to be speaking Polish but he thinks he occasionally hears Russian and a variety of voices speaking English but once again it's usually terse statements of the phonetic alphabet.
You move down into the flooded trenches. The coffee-coloured water is icy cold and comes up to your belts in some places and underfoot are all sorts of obstructions as the parapet, the concertina wire and the detritus of war have fallen into the trench. However it seems the rain covers your approach and the teams slog through the mess and out into the former No Man's Land as no sign of you being spotted can be discerned. Here a keen eye is kept out for minefield markers, the trench lines were often protected by belts of mines, but none seem to be in this area - at least that you can see. The low ground in front of the fort was defended by belts of concertina wire in wooden hurdles, some of them six coils high. However several lanes have been blown through it or smashed down by heavy vehicles leaving a tangled mess that's possible to clamber through but several of you receive nasty cuts and torn BDUs.
In front of you looms the massive fort, its thick earthen ramparts are unrecognisable as the clean cut walls of before the war and instead are a pock marked high bank studded with craters. The two huge breaches, blown in possibly by aerial earthquake ordnance, have massive rubbles piles around them that have to be clambered over. The forward teams make the base of this obstacle and call up the second team. They move up the southern route, through the deep muck and by the time they come up they're head to foot covered in a thin layer of mud. You grasp you weapons with chilled hands, listening to the sporadic fire inside the fort. As you peer into the rain you suddenly hear a high pitched screaming and then a pistol shot rings out and it goes silent again.
Inside the fort there is another rampart and in here the mess of war is indescribable. Everything seems to have been shot with a variety of weapons and pock marks and craters have covered everything. The killing ground between the ramparts has several belts of concertina wire and there are mine warning signs everywhere. The NATO attackers laboriously dug saps straight into the fort at a great cost in human life and you follow these two trenches through the semi-dry moat and up the internal rampart. You clamber up this muddy trench, sometimes on hands and knees, to the top.
It's been hard going for thirty minutes to get here. You are covered in mud, bleeding from superficial wounds and soaked to the skin. The adrenalin starts to pump and you enter the hyper-vigilant pre-combat state that will cost you dearly after the fight in mental exhaustion. Your mouths are suddenly dry when you hear the odd shot, any one of those supersonic rounds could blow a hole in you you could push a beer can through. However it seems you are still undetected.
The top of the rampart was the fighting position. It had stone and concrete positions for old muzzle loading cannon and these have been strengthened by WarPact gabions and sandbags. The sap debouches through a large hole blown in them, you guess the NATO troops used a significant demolition charge to breach the position. Clambering past the broken concrete strung on rusting reinforcing bar and scattered and burst sandbags you look out onto the interior of the fort.
The wide interior of a fort is called a parade and the level of the parade of Fort Szczęśliwice is about two metres below the top of the interior rampart. Looking out you can see that at the rear of the fort is a more traditional walled structure but this has been reduced by massive artillery and air strikes into heaps of rubble and broken walls. You do know this fort like the other Warsaw forts had extensive underground galleries of some sort, the are probably flooded to some degree you guess.
The parade has been used for farming by the looks of it. The craters have been filled and rain-softened rows of earth. Here and there across the field are scattered bodies, most in the ubiquitous Wz. 68 Moro both the Polish second and third echelon troops wear and the vast amount of Polish civilians wear as well. They lie in heaps, obviously some have been gunned down as they ran, you don't see any weapons near them and none of them wear webbing - the tell tale signs of civilians.
Through the pouring rain you can see that there are five armed upright figures on this wide flat area; three are dragging some bodies into a pile and another is stripping another body nearby. The last is looking out over the area, some sort of Kalashnikov at the ready. The rain is too heavy to clearly see them but they seem to also wear the grey uniforms but you immediately note they have red and white armbands.
Caution takes hold. No one in their right mind stands out in the open like this without some sort of cover.
