by Stuart Slade
That didn’t take long at all. The fire took hold and reached the ammunition store. The gun exploded in a brilliant white flash that scattered great burning trails across the snow. Three guns left and the Russians were closing in fast. It hadn’t taken long for them to exploit the destruction of the gun. They used the cloud of black smoke from the burning vehicle to cover their approach. Heim thought quickly. The Panzerfaust has a range of around 30–60 meters depending on the version the Russians had captured. If they seized the position around the burning gun, they could open fire on the next vehicle and roll the whole artillery position up. It was time to do something about that.
“Take over the machine gun!” He snapped the words at the nearest soldier on the ground beside his vehicle and jumped down. Then he pointed at two men from the crew. “You and you. Follow me.”
He repeated the same process with the three surviving gun crews. That gave him seven men including himself, all armed with assault rifles. A dozen men were left to man the remaining artillery positions. It was thin but he hoped it would be enough. Then, he took his squad behind the parked guns and worked his way towards the burning gun. A quick burst of fire from right next to it showed him that his fears were already well on the way to being realized. The Russians had taken the position and were holding it, positioning themselves dangerously close to the destroyed self propelled gun in order to take advantage from the smoke. That could work against them as well, they had to be ducking to avoid the wreckage being flung around by the secondary explosions.
He took aim and his seven men raked the position with fire from their rifles. Then, they ran forward, their snow shoes helping them glide over the piles of frozen snow and ice that lay between them and the Russians. Two of his men went down. One collapsed in a bloody heap as a PPS-45 burst ripped him up. The other, Heim couldn’t see. A grenade fragment? Or a rifle bullet. It didn’t matter. He and the four others jumped into the Russian troops. They flailed with their rifle butts and stabbed out with bayonets. A frantic, chaotic slaughter that Heim couldn’t understand or follow. He beat one Russian down, bayoneted him, then fired his rifle so that the recoil jerked the bayonet out of the body. When he ducked, he felt a slam on his side. A butt strike from a Russian who held an StG-44 identical to Heim’s own. The blow took his breath away but the Russian fell also, shot down by the one surviving man who was with Heim.
There were five dead Russians in the pit by the burning self-propelled gun and three more dead Germans. Heim looked across, another group of partisans were already approaching, attempting to regain the self-propelled gun position. Heim did a quick count. Eighteen, perhaps twenty?
“How many rounds have you got?”
“One magazine. And Shultzie has two. Here.”
The soldier handed the extra magazine over to Heim. With two magazines each, the two of them couldn’t hold this position. The best they could do was hope that they could delay the Russian assault long enough for somebody to think of something. He took aim at one group and squeezed off a quick burst. They scattered, leaving a figure laying still on the ground. That was good, but the burst of return fire wasn’t. It seemed as though every gun in the Russian army was firing on his little position.
Across from the cover, another group of partisans rushed forward. Suddenly, they were intercepted by a burst of fire that felled four of them and sent the remainder scuttling back to cover. Heim looked over to his left. A group of German troops, almost twenty of them were moving in to the gun positions and along the line. A part of them were heading this way. Heim watched them, with shock recognizing the figure that led the section.
“Sergeant, your men told me you were here. Situation?”
“Enemy in the woods over there and around our flank. They got this gun but we pushed them out again. There’s a lot of them, a hundred or more. All with a automatic weapons and there’s ski-troops mixed in with them.” Heim looked at Captain Lang with amazement. Despite everything, the man’s silk scarf was still snowy, unstained white.
“Well done. I’ve got 22 men with me. I’ll leave six with you and disperse the rest between the remaining guns. That should hold this position.”
There was a note of query in Lang’s voice, as if he was expecting approval. Heim appreciated it. “That’s good, but there’s our friend overhead to worry about.”
“Ah yes, the Night Witches. We’ve run out of our Fliegerschrecks. We will have to hope that they will not do us too much harm. Hope is about all we have left right now.”
Heim nodded. The reinforcements Captain Lang had brought would help hold the area here. But what was happening on the flanks? And how long would it be before the Ami Jabos turned up in strength.
Heim got one answer to that question almost immediately, the sight of a blue flare that turned red streaking up from the Russian positions.
F-61D “Evil Dreams “ Over Letnerechenskiy, Kola Peninsula
The flares arched up, out of the pine forest and down, changing from blue to red as they burned. They formed a box, defining three of the edges with the front edge of the trees making the fourth. In between them was their target. Its location was marked by a plume of black smoke rising from the trees. That could only be a vehicle burning and the vehicles down there were all German. Lieutenant Quayle swung Evil Dreams around and headed for the defined area. He’d already fired his rockets but he still had six five hundred pound bombs and his guns.
“We’re coming in from the east.” That made sense, if any of the bombs hung up on the racks, they’d land clear of the Russians closing in on the German unit. Bombs often hung up and released late, Quayle had never known one release prematurely. “Donnie, the turret guns are yours, open up on anything that fires on us. Be generous guys, we’re going home soon and we don’t want to take anything back with us.”
“Situation Evil Dreams!” The voice crackled over the radio unexpectedly. “This is Night Mare.”
“Welcome to the party Night Mare. Watch our run, that’ll mark position for you. You have rockets?”
“Sure have Evil Dreams. And thousand pounders.”
That was a problem, thousand pounders were all very well when the Night Witches were behind enemy lines with nothing friendly around but they were too big for this situation. “Hold off on the bombs Night Mare, we’re hitting a confined area here.”
“Roger. Watching your run now.”
Evil Dreams had finished her long turn and started her run towards the area of pine forest marked by the flares. Quayle added power to the engines and started the Black Widow in a shallow dive, her nose pointing straight at the edge of the pine forest. The black stain of the burning vehicle was on the left as she swept down and released her bombs into the treeline framed by the box. Behind her, Night Mare followed the same path. She released her bombs a fraction of a second later. They exploded in the open, a few meters beyond the edge of the pine trees.
“Neat job Night Mare.” The explosions from the smaller bombs had raked the trees with fragments but the blast from the thousand pounders had leveled the tree edge. “And what do we see down there?”
The explosions from the big bombs hadn’t just knocked the trees down. It had exposed at least one German vehicle. It was an eight-wheeled armored car with a large gun fitted. One of the 75mm-armed tank killers. Quayle brought Evil Dreams around and swept down again. He’d selected his 23mm cannon this time. He walked the burst along the ruined treeline until the armor-piercing shots tore into the armored car. The 23mm V-Ya wasn’t much good against tanks, unless the crew were lucky. It was very good against thinly armored vehicles. What had once been an armored car tank destroyer was now a burning pile of wreckage.
Mechanized Column, 71st Infantry Division, Kola Peninsula
Lieutenant Kolchek pulled himself out of the debris thrown around by the bombs. Through the blast-induced confusion he tried to get a grasp on what was happening around him. The rising sun was warming the ground and trees, causing threads of mist to form. He knew what
would happen over the next few minutes, as the sun rose further, the mist would grow, the threads would coalesce into a ground fog that would last until the sun grew hot enough to burn it off. Before then, visibility limited by the trees would shrink to a few meters. That loaded the dice in favor of the attackers.
As if to confirm his opinion, a barrage of shots rang out. A few rifles but mostly the ripping noise of the PPS-45s and the slow, heavy thud of the American M-3s. The bullets ricocheted off the tree stumps and tore through the piles of broken branches that now covered his front. The partisans had taken the opportunity of the disruption caused by the airstrike to push forward until they were within almost touching distance of the German positions. The rattle of gunfire was joined by the heavier thud of grenades, Kolchak guessed what was happening now, the partisans had closed up to the point where the submachine gunners were keeping a foxhole pinned down while the grenadiers tossed their weapons into it. His positions had been mutually supporting but the combination of the strike and the mist was interrupting those plans.
“Sergeant, send a runner back to Colonel Asbach. Tell him we’re falling back, trying to establish a new perimeter. Everybody else, drop back, at least 50 meters. Try and get some separation from the Ivans.”
Kolchek started to scramble backwards. If he could get his men back, they could set up a new line. It would be better-placed that the compromised position he was being forced to abandon. He had in a position in mind. It was where a shallow depression ran through the pine trees. Probably the remnant of a path or game trail. Once his men were set up there, they could establish a front line that could hold. The problem was that this would leave the rearguard and artillery positions hanging. Well, that was for them to worry about, the Colonel would have to warn them.
Floundering through the snow, Kolchek saw the depression ahead of him. He also saw something else, sets of long parallel lines in the snow. He looked at them for a second before the significance of them sunk in. That was just a second too long. As he realized he was looking at ski-tracks, the Siberians in the ditch he was relying on opened fire on the men retreating towards them. Kolchek was one of the first to go down, hit over a dozen times by the spraying burst from a PPS-45. As he bled out on the ground he saw his men being cut down by the Siberians to their rear and the partisans closing in from the front.
1st Platoon, Ski Group, 78th Siberian Infantry Division, Kola Peninsula
Knyaz watched the Hitlerites being shot down with grim glee. As the two American sturmoviks had swept overhead, he had led a group of his ski-troops through a small gap that existed between the fascist flank and rear positions. They had been screened by the trees, the developing mist, the blast from the bombs and the raking bursts of gunfire from the air. His men had moved in behind the fascists and occupied a good position. Then the Hitlerites had disengaged and tried to set up a new defense line. Knyaz and his men had held their fire to the last second before opening up with a withering barrage of automatic fire. Instinctively, the fascists who had survived that first blast of gunfire had recoiled from it and fallen back. Straight into another burst of gunfire from the partisans following up the fascist retreat.
Knyaz had done the same thing before, many times since the grim days before Moscow in the winter of 1941. The fascists hadn’t understood what fighting Siberians had meant back then. Now they knew. They rued the day the Siberian divisions had arrived on the European front. Today was another, and the Hitlerite bodies covering the ground in front of his position were proof of that.
“Bratishka, we have much more to do.” Knyaz thought quickly. The whole German rear was hanging in the air with nothing between his troops and the German command post in the center. “Now, we must help the partisans fighting the fascist artillery. Let us take their gun positions from the rear and show them what it means to fight with the bayonet!”
It sounded good but Knyaz knew it wouldn’t come to that. This battle was being fought with grenades and sub-machine guns and they would clear the fascist artillery out of their positions.
Mechanized Column, 71st Infantry Division, Kola Peninsula
Captain Lang heard the gunfire erupting from the trees behind him. A novice he might be, he was grimly aware now of how little he really knew of warfare. The thought of his behavior when he had first arrived made his stomach cramp with humiliation. Yes, a novice I might be but I can tell that the gunfire and the grenade blasts were indeed behind me. Quite a long way behind me, tens of meters at a guess. He closed his eyes for a second and thought. What would he do if he was the Ivan? He knew the answer because it was straight out of the book. Swing around, pivot his advance and take the gun positions from the rear. With infantry in front and behind, the gunners would be cut down and the pieces would be taken. That could not be.
“Sergeant, get the men together. We’ll cover you while your crews start up the guns. They’ll have to break out, try to join the Colonel in the center. He’ll know what to do. Hurry up man, the Ivans are closing in on us.”
Sergeant Heim needed no encouragement to hurry. Unlike Lang, he was a veteran and he knew that the Ivan ski-troops would be on him very soon. To emphasize that message, a Panzerfaust flew out of the mist and trees. It exploded on the ground, a few meters short of one of the three remaining self-propelled guns. That enthused the crew far more than any verbal exhortations could have done and the gun started to move out. As it did so, a second Panzerfaust exploded in the mud where it had been just a few second earlier. Heim watched the other guns starting to back up while Lang’s handful of infantrymen tried to pin down the partisans advancing from the front.
The gunners were doing their best, Heim knew it, Lang knew it, but time was critically short and conditions were not good. One thing saved the guns, they had been positioned to fire on where the train would be arriving and that was the direction they had to go. So, the drivers were in a better position to move their vehicles, they could see where they were going. And their vehicles were faster going forward. And old joke ran through Heim’s mind but he dismissed it with irritation. Who knew how Italian tanks would perform? They’d never been seen on the Russian Front.
1st Platoon, Ski Group, 78th Siberian Infantry Division, Kola Peninsula
Russian was a remarkably good language for cursing and Knyaz used the available vocabulary to the full. The Hitlerites had guessed his move and were pulling their guns out. The whole rear of the German position was crumbling. The guns and their infantry cover were retreating away from his men and the partisans. The latter were doing their best; they fired their captured Panzerfausts with abandon. The explosions flowered all over the positions the fascists had been holding. But they were missed the guns. That wasn’t surprising, the Panzerfaust was an abominably inaccurate and short-ranged weapon. Knyaz waved his arm and his men started to shift diagonally backwards. They were trying to close in on the gun positions before they could be evacuated. His men fired on the fascists, sending them tumbling down but too few. The guns were getting clear.
Two of the three survivors did. The third, the last to get moving, couldn’t quite get out of range fast enough. One Panzerfaust hit it in the tracks. The rocket blew off the forward idler and a road wheel. The track broke and the self-propelled gun spun around and stopped. A second Panzerfaust hit the side of the boxy gun compartment and sent steel fragments howling around inside the structure. Knyaz saw the surviving crew abandon the vehicle. Almost without thinking he and his men opened fire, cutting them down in a hail of sub-machine gun fire.
The self-propelled gun was already starting to burn when a series of blasts turned it into an inferno. The partisans were close enough to throw anti-tank grenades at it. For a brief second, Knyaz actually felt sorry for the gun. It had been stolen from its original owners and brought so far to die in the pine forests of Russia. Then his mind snapped back to more important things. With the fascist flank and rear caving in, the battle was moving into end game. Crushing the fascist pocket completely. The fascists had also
come a long way to die in the forests of Russia. Knyaz didn’t feel sorry for them at all.
Mechanized Column, 71st Infantry Division, Kola Peninsula
It was an odd thing, Asbach mused, that the Night Witches overhead didn’t seem nearly so deadly in daylight. He’d never actually seen one before. All he’d seen were dark shadows flashing overhead or bursts of fire from the darkness. To see the grey jabos circle his position and occasionally dive down to deliver bursts of gunfire, somehow took the mystery away from the feared intruders.
“Colonel, our right flank has caved in, Kolchek tried to disengage but the Siberians had got behind him. There’s only one survivor, a runner he sent out. Captain Lang reports he’s had to disengage from the rear, he was outflanked and had the enemy behind him. Siberians again.”
Siberians, Asbach thought, always the Siberians. “Is Lang still alive?”
“Yes Colonel. He and the two surviving guns are heading here.”
That was it; Asbach saw that the game was over. His command was being squeezed back and would soon be overrun. That would be the end for nobody took prisoners on the Russian Front. Even the Canadians and Americans had given up that custom. Asbach shuddered slightly, in one way it was lucky they were fighting Siberians. Some of the American units had whole battalions recruited from the American Indian tribes, Sioux, Apache, Comanche. The SS had tried to demoralize some of the Apache troops. They had taken a few prisoners in night raids then left their mutilated bodies for the Apache soldiers to find. Only, it hadn’t worked. The Apache had buried their dead and then replied in kind. When the SS had found what had been done to the bodies of the victims, even the hardest of the SS men had vomited in horror. No, it was better to be fighting the Siberians.