by Barry Sadler
The battalion was reformed. The faces of the replacements were younger every year, indeed every month. Faces like Manny's that would soon look older than their years, especially their eyes, old men's eyes in eighteen-year-old faces, Nikopol was to their front about three or four kilometers, and just to the rear was the encampment of the Kalmyks. They, along with Heidemann's unit, had been assigned to the defense of Nikopol. The Kalmyks, along with their families, had fought fiercely alongside the Germans ever since 1942. They hated the Russians with a savagery that even the SS couldn't match.
They had left the Kalmyk steppes, with their wives and families driving their herds of horses before them. Now they served as scouts, and they specialized in rooting out partisans. They had stayed with the 16th Panzers all the way, and thought of the division as their own personal property and family, something to defend at all costs. They, and Heidemann, were under the command of General of Mountain Troops, Ferdinand Schorner.
The German forces held a bridgehead in an arc seventy-five kilometers across. Behind them ran the Dnieper, and on their southern flank was the Plav-na, a swamp covering a larger area than their own perimeter; these swampy lowlands were the haunts of the partisans. Without the aid of the half-savage Kalmyk cavalry units, it would have been almost impossible to control the guerrillas in the morass of reeds and marsh.
Here they waited, fighting and dying until Father Winter finally proclaimed his mastery over the land. The great cold had come, and like the animals, those that could bury themselves in the earth did so to seek whatever shelter and warmth they could. Anything to keep out of the icy wind that froze a man's feet into blackened stumps, and sapped the will to live until one just sat down and quit, waiting for the peace that would come with freezing. Freezing wasn't so bad; the old-timers said that after a while you couldn't feel the cold, and then for a short time you were actually warm, and that was when death would come. . . .
Langer sat, his eyes barely showing over the lip of the open turret hatch, trying to pierce the darkness. They were out there; every instinct told him that they were coming. It had been too quiet for the last few days, only scouting patrols had been intercepted. It was too quiet! Now he took the watch just before the hours of dawn, Ivan's favorite time to attack. That was when the body in sleep or repose took the longest time to get awake, when seconds meant the difference between life and death. His eyes blanked out. "Flares!"
The sounds reached him split seconds later, but he was already inside the hatch. The Russian barrage lit up the night, one long continuous rolling wave of fiery destruction. It rumbled across the frozen earth. It rolled over them, missing the sitting Tiger. Only the spaaang of ricocheting shrapnel told them how close they had come to being destroyed.
The radio crackled, Heidemann's voice breaking in, "All Panzers, start engines and move out, give support to the infantry, but don't tie yourselves down. If you have to leave them, we can't afford to lose any more armor. This is the Breakout: follow plan 'C' to rendezvous; you're on your own, Ivan is hitting us too." The crackling of the radio stopped, there was no need for anything more to be said.
General Schorner had been expecting this, and contrary to Hitler's orders of "Fight to the last man," he preferred to risk his own life and disobey the suicide orders to save his men. Strangely enough, the order for Breakout was, "Ladies, excuse me, please."
From the north, General Chuykov's 8th Guards Army assaulted the rear of the bridgehead. It was the night of 31 January.
Langer's Tiger patrolled like a hungry wolf between the retreating German forces and the Russians hounding them, trying to keep the Soviet armor off their back until they could break contact. Four times they had sent screeching rounds into advancing Russian tanks, sending them and their crews to eternity.
Everything was in confusion until they could join the main force between the river and Apostolovo. There the situation stabilized, as the German units added their strength to those already there. The uncommon warm spell of the last week had turned the ground from ice to the knee-deep clinging mud that bogged down tanks and trucks. Infantrymen had to tie strips of canvas around their legs to keep their boots from being pulled off by the sucking mud.
Exhausted men, who could go no further, died from suffocation when they fell face first into it, sinking out of sight so that their bodies were not seen by those who marched over them.
Langer wrapped his olive-colored scarf around his lower mouth and nose, leaving only the eyes exposed to the whipping, icy wind. Outside the bunker, the shock of the cold snatched his breath. The whirling winds of snow had covered everything in a clean blanket of virgin white that covered, at least for the time, the horrors that lay beneath them. A distant flickering in the sky lit up the darkness, like a burning star. . . .
Flares. The storm was no guarantee that Ivan wouldn't come across the frozen fields. The temperature had dropped from twenty above to forty below zero. He had seen a snap freeze like this once before, during the retreat from Moscow, the cold that comes so fast that you don't know that it's killing you.
He had come upon a small group of Cossacks. The snow was waist high, and several were mounted. For a moment, he started to fire, until he saw that there were no frozen wisps of breath coming from them, or their animals. One of the riders held a cigaret in hand, head bending over slightly, ready to light it with a match that had blown away. All were dead in the act of living. Langer figured that it had happened three days earlier, when a snap freeze came across the plains from Siberia.
That, with the seventy-mile-an-hour winds, brought a chill factor of over a hundred below zero, so cold that it froze the fluids servicing the brain. It came fast, the white death, so fast that you never knew it. As you were, so you died, asleep or awake. This night was like that, not as cold perhaps, but cold enough to kill over a thousand men on both sides before the dawn would come.
Small flickers in the night showed where crews of tanks built small fires under their vehicles to keep the engines from freezing solid. Antifreeze didn't help. Machine gunners heated bricks red hot and put them on the breeches of the weapons to prevent them from locking up if they had to be used. The bricks had to be changed every ten minutes.
Heaving his way through the knee-deep white, breath laboring and aching, he looked for Manny, trying to find his bearings to the outpost. It was only a hundred and fifty meters from the bunker, but it took over twenty minutes to make it, fighting the wind and drifts.
Stooping over, he moved the canvas covering aside, letting a blast of arctic air enter with him. The wind almost blew out the tin-can stove which served only to keep the worst of the cold out. Gus grumbled at the incursion; he was at the aperture, searching out the Russian side of the field through a pair of artillery range-finding glasses. The opening was packed with rags around the lenses, which he had to wipe off every couple of minutes to keep them from icing up.
"Goddamn, Sarge, it's about time! Where is Manny? I thought that he was supposed to relieve me!"
"He never showed?"
Concern erased Gus's habitual cynicism. "No, he hasn't been here. Then he's still out there!" Gus started to move past Langer and was stopped by a gloved hand.
"No, you stay here. I'll backtrack and see if I can find him. Maybe he holed somewhere with another crew. You stay and keep an eye on the front, unless you feel a desire to have the Siberians play games with you. Remember Moscow. . . ."
Unwillingly, Gus conceded and returned to the lenses. "Find him, Carl, please."
That was the first time, the only time, that Langer had ever heard Gus say please to anyone.
Back in the dark, the wind was trying to cut through to the skin. Ice built up on his eyebrows and collected in the hair of his lids, trying to squeeze them shut and close them forever, as it had done to so many others in this waste of frozen nightmares.
CRUMP! CRUMP! The dull thumping explosions of incoming mortar rounds walked over the earth. linger threw himself beside a broken tree, sinking down,
face forward, into the drift built around the base of the tree the height of a man's waist.
The barrage walked on searching out anything it could kill. Langer rose to his knees, lungs aching, and leaned against the trunk of the shell-wrecked tree.
Something in the shape of the drift piled up on the base of the tree bothered him. A fresh burst of wind came across the fields from the north. A gust blew past his face and whipped at the drift he was looking at, blowing a piece of crust off the top. A helmet top. A coldness gripped his insides, but it wasn't caused by the wind. Using his glove, he wiped away the snow from the helmet and face, knowing what he would find, but hoping that he was wrong. Manny's face stared out from its glowing white cover. The eyes were wide open, his face calm, no trace of fear or of anxiety, looking as if he had just stopped to rest and think for a moment and was forever frozen in that state. Ice crusted around his eyes and mouth made him look older than his nineteen years. Langer moved the rest of the snow from him and picked up what used to be Manfried Ertl. The body was frozen solid in the sitting position. Langer struggled back to the bunker carrying his burden; the wind blew on, uncaring. Manfried was of no importance, only one more to be added to the roll call of the greatest of Russian killers— General Winter. Laying his burden on the snow on its side by the bunker, Langer went inside. There was no need to bring Manny in to thaw. The cold would keep him until they could bury him.
An infantry company of SS, moving up under the cover of darkness, died in its steps. 155 mm shells set to explode in the air picked their spot to do so directly over the SS men. The concussion killed more than shrapnel. The company looked as if they had just lain down to catch some sleep.
Langer and his crew tried to pull themselves deeper into the dirt floor of their bunker. There was nothing they could do to fight back, they just had to take it. They slept only when exhaustion finally claimed them. Even the shaking of the frozen earth was not enough to keep their grime laden eyelids open. They slept unmindful of the hell that raged around them.
Manny's body was no longer a problem; a 105 shell had disposed of it forever.
German sentries on the forward observation posts were the first to know that hell was on its way. From the distance, winking eyes of light joined together until there was one continuous rim of flashing illuminations, setting the horizon on fire. Then came the screaming of the shells. The Russian offensive had begun! Over a thousand pieces of artillery, and hundreds of multiple rocket launchers pounded a three-mile section of the front for five days, twenty-four hours around the clock without cease. Russian gunners and crews worked themselves to death, hearts breaking under the strain of loading their guns with the heavy shells. As they fired, many lost their hearing forever. The shells fell in hundreds and thousands, over a hundred rounds fired for every German in the target area. Men and animals died. The screaming of the horses, wild-eyed and trembling, was worse than that of the men. Eardrums were shattered, blood running from the ears to freeze in blackened clots on the side of the face.
A seventeen-year-old private, who had been on the front for only three days when the barrage began, stuck the muzzle of his Mauser rifle into his mouth and pulled the trigger with the aid of a stick. Many more took his way out of the nightmare. Others by the dozens merely walked away, no longer able to cope. The pounding, interminable concussions ripping their minds apart and sent them stumbling back slack jawed, hands dangling at their sides or holding their heads trying to keep out the sounds. They staggered to the rear, only to find peace at the hands of the SD. Like children they cried and obeyed when they were told to kneel, still holding their hands over their ears to keep out the sounds of distant thunder. They didn't even hear the neck shots fired by their comrades that finally took the nightmares away.
Russians came by the tens of thousands, white winter camouflage mixed with mustard brown. They swarmed into the gap, killing the still stunned Germans by the hundreds before the Fascists even knew they were there. In their ears they still heard the thunder. For the Russians, it was inconceivable that anyone could survive the hell of fire that they had laid on, much less be able to fight when it stopped.
But, somehow, men did survive it; and the few moments of respite they had while the Russians mopped up the men in front gave those in the rear time to crawl out of their holes and burrows. Tears streaming from their faces, black from grime and filth, stinking filthy apparitions. They came out with guns in their hands. At last here was something they could deal with. Many, in their frustration, beat at the sides of the Russian tanks with riflebutts and shovels; pounding, striking, anything to hit back at the terror that had torn them for the last five days. Like insects they attacked, beating and screaming at the steel beasts until, when they annoyed it too much, it would turn and trample them under. But many of the beasts died too. Desperate men fired Panzerfausts from twenty feet. Others threw themselves bodily onto the Russian tanks holding mines and sticky bombs; exploding themselves and the Russians, turning both into warm spots on the frozen fields.
Langer raised his head not sure of the silence. Why had the earth stopped shaking? It didn't feel natural. The earth was supposed to tremble and move with the vibrating waves of the barrage. Blood dripping from his nose and ears, he pulled himself out of the bunker, pushing aside fallen planks.
Crawling back inside, he kicked his men into awareness. Cursing and shoving, he forced them out into the open where the habits of years took over. Behaving as automatons, they went about their duties clearing the junk off the Tiger. They climbed inside shutting the hatches.
Gus's face was that of a man about to go mad, but his hands hit the starter switch by themselves. The Maybachs roared into life again. The rumbling gave them some sense of purpose. Teacher loaded and sighted. Yuri sat on the hull MG, his face the only one that showed no sign of strain. Calm, peaceful, ready to kill or die as he had always been. Only he had been able to lose himself inside his own mind and block out the thunder.
"Move out!" Gus's hands and feet moved, sending the eighty tons out of its hole onto the frozen surface. It rose from the ground in time to strike out at the first wave of Russians, mowing them down like fields of wheat beneath the raking fire of the hull MG and that of the turret. Teacher reloaded and fired with HE rounds. There was no way to miss.
Langer raked the field, the heat from the breech of his MG was welcome warmth. He fired, killing men by the dozens, but nothing could stop the Russian advance. Not tanks, not courage, only death could still them, and there were too many. They split the German forces and the tides of battles surged their own way. One took Langer's Tiger to the north until the tank ran out of fuel on the edge of the battlefield. It rested in the thin trees of the edge of a forest. The battle passed them by as it did hundreds of others. Ivan would come back for them later.
Hauptmann Heidemann thrust his Panther in the way of four assaulting KV-Is trying to give a hospital unit a few more seconds to get away with their wounded. He had taken out two when a 76 mm shell tore through the side plating of the turret, cutting his body in half before it exploded in the ammo racks. The Panther burst open to burn for a few minutes and then die.
The hospital was next. The Russians killed them all, wounded or whole made no difference. They drank medical alcohol, raped the few women there and then killed them. Urra Stalino, this was war the way they liked it. They had been promised the women of Germany and took them wherever they found them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"I'm hungry." Gus was back to normal and that one statement broke the tension. Teacher and Langer fell to laughing as Yuri looked with amazement at Gus's yawning maw, down which incredible lengths of blood sausage were disappearing. Gus fascinated him. If he had been from the steppes he would have been a Hetman, a chieftain. There, excess in anything was admired.
Langer dug in his pack and took out a last pack of cigarets, handing one around to each of his men. Teacher tore his in half and stuck half in his pipe.
They emerged from their
steel shelter, and stood in the drifts, listening. The sounds of battle were far away and receding, the storm was passing them by, leaving them for the moment, alone.
Without being told, Gus and Yuri began to take their gear out of the Tiger. Personal weapons and food would be all they could take. It might be a long time and way until they rejoined a German unit. More likely Ivan would find them first.
Langer spoke softly. "Teacher, what do you think?"
Stomping his feet to keep the circulation going, he puffed slowly at his pipe. "I don't know, Carl. Only death waits to the south. We might have a better chance of connecting if we go north. Maybe the front's still holding there."