TIGER TRACKS
Three Days on the Eastern Front
Wolfgang Faust
Copyright © The Estate of Wolfgang Faust 2016
This Edition Published Globally 2016 by Bayern Classic Publications
Translated by Sprech Media
All rights are reserved, including resale,
quotation and excerpt, in part or whole, in all languages.
This is not a ‘public domain’ text in any part.
Originally serialised in the German Federal Republic as
‘Panzerdammerung’
(‘Panzer Twilight’)
Original Introduction From The Author
Only those who experienced our war in the East can truly picture its scale and ferocity. There are many of us who were there; I believe that of the 20 million men who served under German arms from 1939 to 1945, 17 million served exclusively on the Russian front. Yet, the survivors are less than that number, and our experience is not readily discussed in public today.
For this reason, I have written this book, which for me encapsulates the spirit of that war, with its slaughter, chaos, universal destruction and its strange bravery on all sides. I have drawn on what I experienced as a Tiger panzer crew man; nothing that I have set down here is exaggerated or confected.
Some press critics have already said that this book is ‘needlessly controversial,’ ‘too provocative’ or even ‘too violent,’ comments which seem incredible when applied to a book about the East. I note that these criticisms come chiefly from civilian reviewers who were not present at the front. From those who were there in the panzers, in the dust, snow and mud, I have received confirmation that the book is true to the life that we led and the way that we gave battle. Such confirmation is all that I sought.
Wolfgang Faust
Köln am Rhein
July 1948
TIGER TRACKS
Western Russia, October 1943
Between the mud and the snow, Russia gave us ice. And in the ice, my God, that Tiger was a heavy lump of iron to drive. Sixty tonnes of the Reich’s finest metal, fitted with the widest tracks ever designed – but still, in that frozen Russia, the verdamm beast would slither and claw its way around, with me riding its gears like a boy riding a dragon.
It was bad enough in the assembly area that morning, as our company of twenty Tiger I panzers came in from their concealment points and began to form up before dawn, with their exhausts sparking flames and their great dish wheels throwing out icicles one metre long. But when we heard the order ‘Panzer Marsch!’ and we surged out to form up into our arrowhead, with our lead tank at the tip of the arrow, and the others in a flying v-shape behind him, our twenty 88mm guns pointing at the heart of the Red zone – that was when it got tough for this humble panzer driver.
We were advancing east across three kilometres of steppe, right into the Ivan army’s flank, heading for a line of Red bunkers on higher ground that we had to destroy. Three kilometres of freezing tundra, filled with bomb craters, other destroyed tanks and the little tricks that the Reds liked to play on us German boys.
If our Tiger slid through the mist into one of those craters, with deep water under the crust of ice, then our panzer would become a U-boat. If our vehicle collided with one of the wrecked T34s still smouldering from the previous day’s combat, then we might detonate their ammunition or damage our precious track links. And if we ran into one of Ivan’s special traps – the anti-tank ditch concealed with straw, or the flamethrower that ignited when a panzer rolled over a cable – then we’d breathe our last gulp of Russian air, if we were lucky. The less fortunate might survive, and take the prison wagon to Siberia.
Peering through my armoured vision slit at the steppe out in front, and following my commander’s instructions from up in the turret cupola, I dreaded any of these things happening to our Tiger; despite our armour plate, I had the sweating hands and dry throat that always came from facing the big Red war machine.
In the east, the winter sun began to rise like a piece of hot iron, but it gave no warmth to the landscape, which stayed shrouded in low mist and drifts of ice. Overhead, three of our Focke-Wulf fighters streaked forward, trailing vapour, and then a slow, lumbering flight of six Stukas heading out to soften up those Ivan bunkers for our Tigers to maul.
Inside our panzer, it was humid now, as the groaning transmission became hot and warmed the sealed-in air. Condensation collected on my dials, scalding oil from the transmission spat on my face, the reek of carbon monoxide made my head throb, and I almost envied our commander up in the turret, still with his head up in the morning air – despite the risk he ran of losing that clever brain to a shell or a sniper.
‘What a stench!’ the gruff voice next to me muttered. ‘If they could bottle this cologne for me to wear, I won’t be troubled by so many blondes on my next leave in Hamburg.’
Our radio operator and hull machine-gunner, Kurt, was the ugliest bastard in the Heavy Panzer Battalion – and my best comrade. I didn’t have to look at him over the shuddering transmission housing to know he was sighting down the eyepiece of his MG34, and monitoring the signals from our other panzers with his great, deformed ears in his headphones.
In front of us, the line of Tigers on our side of the surging arrowhead sprayed up plumes of mud and ice into the reddening sky, maintaining a steady 20kph that allowed us to stay in formation and make good time across the no-man’s steppe.
The ground ahead was barren, with just the hulk of another burned-out T34 between us and the ridge in the distance where the target bunkers were sited. Up there, I could see the crooked, black shapes of the Stukas peeling and diving out of the dawn sky, diving almost vertically – and as I watched, great spouts of debris shot up as their bombs exploded on the Ivan forts.
I wiped my sweating forehead on my sleeve, and glanced around momentarily at the base of the turret cage. I saw three pairs of feet in there: the scuffed lace-up boots of our 88mm gunner and our loader – and the polished jackboots of Oberleutnant Helmann, our vehicle commander. The shine on those boots was legendary, like Helmann’s coolness in action, his taste for cognac and his hatred of the Reds. I glanced back at my vision slit, and made a slight change to the differential, steering us around the wrecked T34. The Ivan tank was a blackened hulk, surrounded by debris, with its tracks hanging off and its gun pointing down.
I blinked as I looked at that T34. It was perhaps 200 metres away, outlined against the skyline, and through the mist on my vision block I thought I saw the verdamm thing moving its gun.
‘What the scheisse?’ Kurt grunted beside me. ‘That Ivan is moving.’
I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. This smashed, burned tank, with its tracks lying in spools on the steppe around it, was elevating its 76mm gun, and its turret was traversing onto us. What the hell was going on here?
‘Fire on the Red!’ Helmann shouted over the headphones – the order was to our gunner, who lived with his face glued to the eyepiece of the gun sight. ‘Fire on him!’
I heard our turret traverse with its drive motor, as our gunner calibrated on the T34, which now had its barrel pointed at our whole flank of ten panzers, aiming at hull sides where our armour was comparatively thinner. Our other Tigers were traversing onto him too – all the crews had observed that this hulk was apparently coming to life.
That T34 got off one single shot before he was blown to pieces.
His muzzle flashed and spat fire – and at the same moment, he was hit by half a dozen armour-piercing shells from the Tiger muzzle brakes that spat, smoked and recoiled in unison at the intruder.
In our turret, the huge gun barked, and the shell
case sprang out with a clang.
Two things happened straight away.
First, the T34 disintegrated as the broadside of 88mm shells smashed into its armour at zero range. The turret split open, and for a moment I saw a man in there – a single gunner – twisting as his carapace was blown apart. Then he too disappeared as the hull below him was demolished, with the deck separating from the walls and the sloped glacis plate breaking into pieces that span away in the air like bits of a tin can. His ammunition in there exploded, and the mangled turret ring gave out a blast of sparks and flames that rose high above our column.
A beacon of success – but at the same time, I saw that the Tiger at the very tip of our spearhead, our leading panzer, was shuddering and throwing out metal treads from its tracks. Suddenly, its whole track on the right side came flying out backwards, thrashing in the wake of the rear idler wheel like a horse-whip. Track links broke off and hit the following panzers; then the damaged Tiger slowed down in a spray of mud, and juddered to a halt.
‘That Red bastard hit the Boss,’ Helmann said coolly over the headphones. ‘The Boss is stranded here now, the poor soul.’
‘Shall I halt, sir?’ I asked over the intercom.
‘No panzer can halt,’ Helmann replied. ‘These are our orders.’
The Boss was our commander – our Hauptmann – who had led the unit since the glory days of Barbarossa. Now Helmann, as his second-in-command, would automatically take over the leader’s role.
Kurt winked at me over the bulkhead separating us. To lead the Heavy Panzer Unit into an attack – that was always Helmann’s wish – and now he had it.
The Boss’s damaged panzer remained stranded, while the following Tigers moved around it without slowing or losing formation. Briefly, I saw the immobilised Tiger as we went past it, with its track blown off by that single shell from the T34 before the Russian was destroyed. The static Tiger’s crew were starting to clamber from their hatches to assess the damage – but we could all see that the track was smashed, and the vehicle would be unable to move without a recovery panzer to bring a whole new length of track links.
‘Maybe that’s a bad omen,’ Kurt muttered beside me, changing his mood. ‘How did that wrecked Ivan manage to take a shot?’
‘Such is the Red Army,’ Helmann said without emotion, speaking from the turret through our headphones. ‘They find a gunner who’s made some mistake, they tell him his family will go to Siberia unless he dies a hero’s death, and they put him in a wrecked tank that still has a half-way working gun. They tow it out here at night and dump it, with him inside and a few shells.’
‘That’s how it works, is it?’ Kurt said into the intercom. ‘If I was him, I’d jump out and hand myself over to good German hospitality.’
‘Ah, but they put a padlock on the hatches,’ Helmann said. ‘And they tell him to think of his lovely wife who won’t enjoy the Arctic Circle. Now enough of talking, and let’s watch for any more of these Red games. We are close to the target here.’
‘The Boss, sir –’ I said.
‘He’ll be ok, Faust. Keep driving.’
I had no time to reflect on what chance our stranded Boss and his crew had of surviving in the steppe. We all knew that the disputed tundra held Red infantry fighters hidden in lairs, who would begin to emerge and prowl around any immobilised panzer. But at that point, we had our own battle to fight.
Ahead of us, the diving Stukas had left vertical trails in the freezing air that still remained sharp, like twists of steel wire against the dawn. They pointed downward to the fires and clouds of dust where their bombs had struck, pulverising the Red bunkers and blockhouses that we were now to attack, to crush and overrun. We knew, though, that the Reds were at their most vicious when they’d taken a beating – like surly Red dogs, Helmann often said.
We were about 1500 metres from the enemy bunkers, close enough to see the smoke drifting from the Stuka bomb craters. I was feeling jumpy, as I so often did in action, as each minute seemed to stretch out interminably, every second full of the threat of a mine under the tracks, or a heavy-calibre PAK round smashing through the bulkhead beside my head. The stench of the Tiger’s compartment was overlaid with the bitter scent of the 88mm blast. I wished the waiting was over, and we could start firing, or manoeuvring, or anything other than this slow, onward advance under the eyes of the watching Reds.
The waiting ended when the smoke around the bunkers parted – and a stream of T34 tanks came pouring out to face us.
I laughed with a weird relief – and beside me, big, ugly Kurt did the same, hunched over his MG34 stock, moving the ball-mount left and right across the ground ahead. Through my headphones, I heard the rapid discussion between Helmann and our gunner, and I heard the loader grunting as he seized another round of armour-piercing in readiness. Then the orders came fast and furious, as the Russian tanks charged towards us across the wretched steppe of their homeland.
Even through the specks of mud on my vision block, I could see that these were the upgraded type of T34s, with enlarged turrets and the long 85mm gun they carried to deal with us dashing lads in our Tigers. Their hulls were thinner than ours, though, and against our high-velocity 88mm warheads, any kind of strike from us was a danger to them. Their only hope was to get close enough to make their guns count – and this was their tactic, setting their thicker front plates towards us and accelerating, with their bulbous turret fronts leaning forwards . . .
‘Like dogs,’ Helmann muttered, using his favourite metaphor. ‘Like a pack of dogs.’
His voice was drowned out as our 88mm fired – and the Tiger flattened down in its motion as the breech recoiled. Smoke from the muzzle breech clouded my vision momentarily, and when that cleared I saw our Tigers spreading out from their arrowhead, moving into a broad arc that stretched for a kilometre left and right across the plain. I moved our Tiger into the line, being roughly in the centre, and aimed our panzer for the Russian bunker line that we had to smash through. I saw one of these T34s, barely a kilometre away now, explode on first contact with our ordinance – the turret lifting up into the air and spinning over repeatedly, scattering the burning remains of the gun crew behind it. The hull itself flashed and blew up in a blaze of fuel.
I focussed on a little pack of three Red tanks that was advancing in our direction, with mud flying around them as they charged towards the centre of our line.
‘Slow down,’ Helmann told me. ‘Steady the gun on this uneven ground, man.’
I went down to 10 kph, so the rolling terrain would have less effect on the accuracy of the gun. The split second between our gunner pulling his trigger and the shell leaving the muzzle was now made more stable, but of course we were a slower, easier target. We had to trust in the 10cm of steel on our front hull, and the 12cm on our turret. The Tigers beside us slowed similarly, and together we in the centre of the line fired repeatedly on the advancing Russian armour. That pack of three T34s took the brunt of our guns immediately, as lines of our bright red tracer shot towards them
I saw one of the Red machines take a hit on his front plate, which made the whole tank bounce and recoil, as a spray of metal pieces erupted from his armour. Another round hit him in the gun mantle, and the turret jerked to one side at the blow, but the 88mm round deflected off and went spinning wildly across the steppe. A third round pierced him between the turret and hull – and the whole gun mantle exploded off, leaving a gaping hole which gushed with sparks.
Defenceless, the tank tried to turn to flee – but as its panicking driver slewed to one side, he presented his thinner hull flank, and paid the price for his mistake as another line of tracer penetrated the crew compartment there. I saw the wrecked turret spurt a plume of flames from the broken mantle and the turret hatch, and the whole vehicle span around on its axis, out of control, pouring with fire.
I did not spare any emotion for the burning crew boys; my simple mind, trained in the backstreets of Munich to watch for danger, turned attention to the othe
r two T34s, who were now halted in a spray of mud some 500 metres from me. Their muzzles flashed, and I saw green tracer race towards us. There was a crash from in front of me, and the electric light over my head exploded, showering me with fragments. My transmission raced for a moment, slipping the gears, and then I got the beast under control and prevented it sliding sideways on to the enemy. We were hit on the front plate beside my head, between Kurt and me, but the great Tiger kept on rolling slowly forward, and our 88mm kept booming out from the turret behind me.
Through the mist of blast gas, oil fumes and exhaust in our hull, I saw in my vision slit the tank that had just fired being hit in the right hand track, which flew up into the air, dragging with it the steel drive wheel. Crippled, it tried to reverse – but it simply dug a grave for itself with its running track, which raced around and sank deep into the mud. Its gun kept on firing, and the Tiger beside us was hit on the turret in a shower of sparks, until one of our shells punched into the T34’s bow, close to its smashed front wheels, and split open the armour plate.
We advanced as that tank began to burn, and its crew began to emerge from the hatches to escape the flames. Next to me, the compartment echoed as Kurt loosed off two seconds from his gimbal-mounted MG34, catching the Russians as they clambered out onto the hull and turret. He cut them down, then ceased fire, breathing hard and cursing to himself.
I never knew if he liked the killing, or if he hated it.
The third of these T34s that we were facing in our section now began to reverse, firing wildly as it went back, throwing up a curtain of black mud, ice and debris from its wide tracks. Indeed, as I glanced left and right along our line, I could just make out that the T34s were generally retreating from us, although one of our Tigers had been set on fire and was burning with a crimson glow around its engine deck. I saw the shapes of maybe five of the Russian tanks, burning or pouring smoke, one with its turret shot away and another lying on its side with its tracks still turning slowly in the air.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 1