‘The Hanomags,’ Helmann said. ‘The verdamm prisoner. Get us back to the Hanomags, Faust.’
I drove directly into the trees, bulldozing several of them down with our hull front to force a path past the stranded Tiger. Roots and trunks whirled in front of us as we demolished a line of birches, and then we were back onto the track and heading back to the Hanomag group. I saw at once that a fight was happening there.
One of the Tigers that remained with the half-tracks was under attack from a ragged gang of partisans, who were crawling onto its hull, armed with bottles and grenades. The panzer was immobile, with one track shed loose along its hull, and although it was firing its MGs, this was doing nothing against the marauding anti-tank fighters. The other Tiger was reversing away, wisely keeping its distance, firing MG onto its comrade panzer to try to knock off the attackers. The Panzergrenadiers were out of their Hanomag transports, fighting hand to hand with other knots of Ivans, who were emerging from the trees with rifles, machine pistols and hand-held bombs.
The fighting was vicious – it was murderous, with men who had zero to lose using all they had against their enemies. One Grenadier, obviously out of ammunition, was slashing and stabbing at the Russians, his bayonet fixed, hacking at the partisans in the body and neck. Another was throwing aside his MP40 and seizing an entrenching spade, using that to beat back the men who charged at him. He was cut almost in half by a burst of heavy MG fire, which sent his guts spinning out across the ice, steaming in the frozen air. I saw a Russian close to our front as we halted, who threw a grenade onto our turret top which deflected off and exploded in the ditch. Kurt demolished the man with a few shots of his MG, and we came to a standstill with our tracks on top of his body.
The Hanomag with the Russian woman inside was directly opposite us.
‘My prisoner,’ Helmann said. ‘I have plans for that verdamm prisoner. My God, and the nurses too, and the wounded. They’re in that Hanomag.’
Wilf was hunched on his gun, sighting left and right, but –
‘They’re all too close,’ he said. ‘I’ll hit our men in all this.’
Helmann cursed, and I saw pale light flood in as he opened the cupola.
‘Faust, come with me,’ he ordered.
I swallowed, took my MP40 from its holder on the hull wall, and opened my hatch.
The icy air filled my lungs, and the danger made me suddenly aware of the cold, the sounds and the flashes of light, my senses working hard to keep me informed. Helmann was already sprinting across the road to the nurses’ Hanomag, which was surrounded by partisans; they were firing into its steel plate and smashing open the rear doors with rifle butts.
The surviving Panzergrenadiers were caught up in their own melee, trying to force back another gang of attackers from beyond the road. One of our troops was an inspiration to the rest – standing bareheaded in the face of the partisans’ fire, shooting his MP40 into the trees as the attackers charged from the shadows. It took three partisans to bring him down with shots and blows, one Ivan wielding a Cossack sabre which decapitated the German and sprayed his blood in a great arc. The curve of blood shone briefly through the ice crystals hanging in the air, before fading away to mere vapour.
His comrades took up the cry, and began to drive the marauders into the trees, sending them tumbling back with shots and bayonet thrusts. There were still dozens, there were scores of partisans in the shadows among the trees.
I thought, My God – how many are there? It felt that half of Russia was venting their anger on us, tearing and clawing at us for every bad thing that we had done to them and their huge, empty country.
I looked away from the grim sight, and saw the partisans already inside the Hanomag where the nurses, the wounded and the Russian woman were stationed. Screams came from within, long female screams and shrieks in German. Helmann fired his MP40 into the swarm of partisans around the rear doors, and I shot down two of these as they dodged and tried to rush at us with machine pistols. The partisans scattered, but shots came from inside the half-track, made hollow by the enclosed steel walls, and we rushed up to the doors.
Inside there, I saw the wounded men, sprawled where they had tumbled on the benches and the floor. They had all been shot. The two nurses were also on the floor, their heads blown open and their blood pouring across the metal. The Russian prisoner woman was scrabbling in the blood on the floor. A huge Ivan fighter was standing over her, holding a machine pistol. She was holding a Walther pistol, which I guessed was the nurses’ suicide pistol, and she was pointing it up at the partisan.
I raised my gun – but Helmann put a hand out and pushed my barrel down. He had a wicked, feline smile on his face, as he watched to see what would happen, even while the infantry fighting continued around us.
The partisan said something to the woman in Russian, and the woman shook her head. The partisan raised his machine pistol. Helmann raised his gun to preserve his prisoner – but the Russian woman saved herself. She shot the Ivan through the chest and stomach, three times in all, each bullet punching out of his back in a burst of steaming bone and flesh. She rolled out of the way as he toppled forward, his bulk practically obliterating the two dead nurses under him.
She looked at Helmann, then at me. She threw aside the nurses’ pistol, and cursed us long and hard in Russian.
All along the track, the firing was dying down as the partisans withdrew. My Tiger sent the last of them on their way with a series of high-explosive shells that ripped open the treeline and churned the fog into spirals in the blast wave.
Helmann fired off his magazine at some figures disappearing into the darkness of the trees beyond the smoke. Then he put his MP40 up on one shoulder, lit a cigarette, and surveyed the scene.
‘We have to get out of the forest,’ he said. ‘All this smoke will rise through the fog and show our location.’
I dragged my eyes away from the dead wounded, the two dead nurses and the partisan, and the desperate figure of the Russian woman as she clenched her fists and tried to stop herself weeping.
‘The Reds killed the wounded,’ I said, trying to make sense of the carnage in the half-track. ‘And the nurses shot themselves, Herr Ober, as they said they would. They shot themselves rather than be raped by the partisans.’
‘But not the Russian woman,’ Helmann said. ‘She shot the Russian, rather than be raped. Put her in the Tiger. I want her with me.’
‘Sir.’
*
We threw our dead, the ones not already burning, onto the hull of the blazing Tiger as it burned out of control, preferring them to be consumed by flames than by the animals of the Red forest. With heavy hearts, we blew up the Tiger that shed its track, unable to effect repairs in our urgency. With six Tigers now, plus three Hanomags and the Flak wagon, we formed up and drove out of the forest in the fog. The last thing I saw of our battleground was that Hanomag still burning, its MG42 gunner still alight at his gun, stripped to bone by the flames.
Further up the track, the Flak gunner boys had done a good job; they had seen a group of twenty partisans outflanking our column in the trees, and shot them to pieces with their quadruple cannons. The Russians’ bodies were lying dismembered among the frozen roots of the woods, their corpses utterly shredded by the 20mm shells. The two young gunners were vomiting in the ditch.
We paused as they moved their Flak wagon into the convoy behind us.
Suddenly, I heard Helmann shout a warning from the cupola, and he loosed off a long burst of his MP40. I saw bits of tree branches fall to the ground. I expected another battle with a sniper, but I heard only Helmann, laughing in his unheimlich manner.
‘Look up there, in the trees on the left,’ he yelled.
I squinted up through the hatch.
‘Scheisse,’ Kurt said. ‘Is that someone’s head?’
Lodged in the fork of two branches above the track was a severed human head, pale and staring, looking straight down at us.
‘I thought it was another
sniper,’ Helmann laughed. ‘But it’s just a partisan who was caught in the Flak cannon. See how high his head flew off? That must be ten metres at least. Move on, Faust.’
*
The situation in our panzer was unusual. The Russian woman was located behind me, sitting on the hull floor, leaning against the half-empty ammunition racks. The Luftwaffe pilot – who had performed well in his new role as loader – was detailed to watch her through the remaining journey. He put his pistol in his belt like a cowboy, and he evidently enjoyed his work, looking down at her from the turret.
I drove. I could feel the machine protesting at its beating, the running gear demanding adjustment and tightening, and the transmission calling for a transfusion of oil. None was available, and the Tiger moaned and cursed as the forest road petered out to nothing, and we emerged from the trees into a region of valleys and ravines which every panzer driver surveyed with a scowl.
Such a landscape was fatal to our vehicles. The Hanomags, maybe, could make it, with their light pressure and truck steering. But to ask a Tiger, already beaten up by action and Russian roads, to cover another fifty kilometres over boulders and ridges? We would be stranded, and become carrion for the Russian crows.
We halted, while Helmann studied his map.
In a minute, Helmann spoke to the panzer commanders over the radio, and in turn they shouted his orders down to the Hanomags and the Flak wagon.
‘There’s a road on the map,’ he said. ‘We will get on it and we won’t stop. Hanomags, Tigers, everyone. We will protect each other, but nobody will stop. Most of us will get to the river and fight in its defence. Those that do, will be heroes there. Those that do not, will be heroes on the way. Questions?’
One of the Tiger commanders said, ‘Herr Ober, where is the road?’
The road led across a high plateau to the north of the valleys, an old east-west route which our armies had used in 1941 and found manageable. It was wide and flat, and would be littered now with the debris of retreat, but what other option was there?
The fog was thinning out now, and the sun was dimly visible in the south. It was around midday, and slats of light came through jagged rips in the clouds, sending purple and bronze light across the landscape. We saw the road in the distance, a dark channel through the tundra, gleaming with ice and frost, pointing directly west to our salvation.
We halted for a few minutes, to prepare ourselves for this race to the river.
Kurt put a jinx on himself, I think, as I completed the last of my checks along the running gear, surrounded by exhaust smoke and the swirls of evaporating fog. The sun was suddenly bright, and showed up every crease on Kurt’s face as he squatted on the hull top, listening to his headphones.
‘Will the old cow make it?’ he said.
I looked at the slackened track length, the worn link pins and the distortion to the drive wheel that had resulted from our crashing into trees in the forest – and then from reversing into our fellow Tiger.
‘Ja, ja,’ I said. ‘She’ll make it.’
‘She won’t, will she?’
‘I’ll point her west, go full speed, and she won’t stop till Paris. We’ll have a beer at the Eiffel tower, you and me.’
Kurt rubbed his craggy chin.
‘I have this feeling that the panzer will make it, and you’ll make it. But me, I won’t make it.’
‘Sure you’ll make it. Why not?’ I said.
Helmann shouted to us to board and start up.
‘Why not?’ Kurt said, lowering into his seat. ‘It’s the girl. She’s bad luck.’
The Russian woman was on the hull floor behind us. From somewhere, Helmann had found a length of steel chain, and her wrists were now chained to the ammunition rack.
‘She’s not bad luck,’ I said. ‘She’s ok.’
‘What happened to all her Russian comrades, eh? And the crew of her Hanomag. And even the nurses with her. They all died. Isn’t that bad luck?’
I didn’t answer, but I started us off in the vanguard of the column, ploughing through the frozen steppe towards the road to our salvation. Helmann gave us a speech on the intercom, which also went out to the crews of the other Tigers. . .
‘We came to this country to build a defence against Bolshevism and the ways of the Slav. My information from Divisional command is that this defence will now be decided on the river to the west. If the Reds cross that line, they will be in the heart of our eastern lands, and we have seen already today the destruction and rape that they will bring. We are a Kessel now, a roving cauldron of defiance. To the river!’
Kurt looked at me and winked, making ‘iron cross’ gestures at his throat.
*
The Sturmoviks found us almost as soon as the fog cleared.
They attacked from the west, to one side, so I saw them break through the grey clouds against a steel-blue sky. The fog had given way to a pale sun that stood over us as big as a moon, and was no more painful to look at. The planes were six in number; they left long vapour lines as they swooped down, and when their cannon started shooting, I saw their orange tracer ploughing across the steppe towards us.
Our Tiger was now in the rear of the convoy, and up ahead I saw the Flak wagon elevate and rotate its four 20mm cannon onto the Russian aircraft. With the connected thinking that comes from exhaustion and fear, I speculated whether those Flak boys would halt to give themselves a stable firing platform, or keep moving to stay with the column. They kept moving, meaning that they had the task of hitting mobile targets from a travelling platform, but at least their fire remained close to us, and we did not leave them behind on the plateau.
The Red planes came down in two waves of three. Their cannon fire was wild, sweeping over the barren landscape, knocking chunks of earth into the air.
The Flak lads fired, their bright, white tracer spiralling up, wide at first, but then with an astute correction they laid their line of fire in front of the descending planes. One of the Sturmoviks was pierced through the tailplane, which flew to pieces behind the aircraft, making it plummet into the ground and explode.
The other two Ivans dropped their bombs low, and the dart-shaped objects shot forwards through the air. Most of them struck wide in plumes of soil and ice, but one came screaming horizontally into the centre of our column, hitting a Tiger squarely in the side of the hull. I saw the explosion tear the wheels and track off, and the great panzer, travelling at forty kph, lifted onto its side in its momentum, trailing its loose track behind it. The Tiger rolled over onto its turret and slid along the tundra, upside down, until it hit a boulder and came to rest against that. There was a flash from under the engine bay, and coils of smoke rose into the blue-grey sky.
Nobody stopped, of course.
The Flak wagon kept firing, swivelling around to hit the second wave of planes, which were so low that their red stars loomed over us as we drove on. The Red cannon fire was more accurate from these pilots, and tore sideways into one of the Hanomags. The half-track was directly ahead of me, and I saw the shells go into the left of the Hanomag body and exit from the right, sending bits of steel spinning up into the air. Some shells appeared to be deflecting around inside the compartment, because the tracer came leaping out of the open top, carrying with it pieces of bodies and clothing. The rear doors of the Hanomag fell open – and the interior was full of smoke and sparks, with men tumbling over each other as they were shot to pieces.
Some men crashed from the open doors – and although I swerved, I could not avoid hitting two or three of them with my tracks while they were still rolling over on the ground. Those Panzergrenadiers who remained inside were lit up by an orange ball of flame as the fuel tank exploded, and the whole vehicle span around on its axis, throwing out burning men and burning equipment.
Our quick-thinking Flak gunners caught another Sturmovik in its web of tracer, but the shells deflected from its armoured belly in a shower of sparks. Truly, that thing was a flying panzer. Only when the tracer hit the propeller wa
s the machine brought down, with the propeller blades disintegrating and whirling across the plateau. The plane itself rolled over on its back in the air, out of control, and its final act, by accident or malice, was to hurl itself into our leading Tiger.
The plane exploded against the panzer from the side – and the plane and the vehicle were hidden in a fireball that rose for hundreds of metres into the air. The Tiger kept moving, its momentum simply unstoppable, trailing a pillar of flames behind it as it careered away from the convoy. I saw the engine grilles fly off, and then the tracks, and finally the whole panzer impacted into a depression in the ground, its dish wheels scattered around it in flames. Only the huge 88mm barrel remained visible, pointing defiantly at the Russian skies.
The bombs of these planes knocked out another Hanomag, which disintegrated in a single flash and disappeared from view. A Tiger was hit on the turret, which was separated from the hull and sent spinning into the air behind it. The three crew were still in the turret cage, their bodies outlined by flames as they twisted. The hull threw out exploding ammunition as it continued to roll, with tracer rounds flying out in spirals of smoke.
The Red Sturmoviks returned for one final strafing run, and sent a furious stream of tracer all along our column. I heard shells strike our turret roof, with hammer blows and the screech of ricochets. I heard the Luftwaffe man begin praying fervently. Kurt fired his ball MG up at the planes as they raced away east, until his gun rattled empty.
Although we were still travelling at full speed, I glanced around to look at the Russian woman chained to the turret ring. She was laughing silently, looking up either at the Luftwaffe pilot, or beyond him to the Red pilots soaring away from us. She looked at me, and her green eyes were flecked with a kind of frenzy. I looked back out of my vision port, and kept driving.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 7