One of the Panthers could take no more, and fired off two rounds of high-explosive, but this hit one of the sledges only after it had mown down the final crew man. The sledge was blown apart, and the bodies of its operators lay burning in the white shrouded slope, alongside the bodies of the panzer men they had just killed.
The remaining sleds raced back up the slope, too fast to hit, and vanished over the crest, their skis lifting metres into the air as they leapt over the white summit.
‘While they played their games, they took a good look at us, of course,’ Wilf said from the turret. ‘They know our disposition and strength now.’
I heard the characteristic sound of Helmann swigging from his hip flask; the noise of his swallowing was loud over his throat intercom. In a minute, the flask was thrown down to the MG man and me, and I swigged the cognac gratefully. I glanced over my shoulder, and threw the flask to the Russian woman chained to the turret bars. She drank eagerly, until the Luftwaffe pilot reached down from the turret and grabbed it back from her with a curse. We needed that drink, because, as the liquor warmed our veins, the Ivan attack began in earnest.
The sky in the east was a deep red colour, shot through with clouds of black and silver. Out of that sky, Sturmovik aircraft came down from high altitude: about a dozen black outlines against the dawn, trailing pearlescent vapour. I saw tracer from the Flak wagon shoot up to meet them, and then more from the single Flak cannons around the bunkers, all stabbing up at the angry, crimson sky.
One Sturmovik was hit in the wings, and it span over on its back – colliding with its comrade alongside. The two aircraft disintegrated, with the armoured compartments of the fuselage plummeting down, and the wings spinning away across the river. The debris was scattered over a wide area, burning brightly on the snow, but the other ten planes did not deviate by a metre. In seconds, they were on us, and releasing from their undersides a huge number of small bombs which screeched down at 45 degrees into our positions.
There were so many of these bomblets that they formed a rolling wave of fire and shrapnel, coming towards the bridge in a carpet of explosion. Many of the bombs landed wide of us, but one load was deadly accurate, and hit a Panther, covering it in smoke and soil. The bombs continued to break around us, making our Tiger hull ring out with the detonations, and slamming into the bunkers, the troop trenches and the bridge itself.
Our Flak fell silent, and no sooner did these Sturmoviks leave, banking over our heads to follow the river north, than a fresh wave came hurtling from the eastern sky. Our Flak fired again, but was ineffective, and our positions took the full force of the bomblets. The small pods were scattered among us as plentifully as dark seeds, raising flowers of flame and steel that tore between our vehicles.
Our armour plate rocked and shrieked as the debris struck, and through the vision port I could see, to left and right, the effect on the other vehicles. One of the two Panzer IVs was hit on the turret, blowing away the turret side hatches. Another bomb fell directly against the open hatch, and as the smoke cleared I saw that the inside of the turret was a chaos of flames and bodies, as ammunition exploded under the writhing figures of the crew.
A Panther was hit also, and the bomb deflected off the front plate without exploding, spinning off into the river behind us. The next moment, though, that panzer was hit by two more bombs, which broke off its cupola and smashed open the engine deck. I saw the commander’s head still in the open ring where the cupola had been, pouring with blood, and the remainder of the crew struggling out of their hatches as the engine began to roar with gasoline flames. Just as the crew stood on the hull, and tried to extricate their commander, one final bomb broke over them, dismembering each man in a whirlwind of fragments.
Pieces of stone, earth and shrapnel continued to crash onto our panzer for a long time. When this finally ceased, I had to open my hatch to clear a mound of soil from in front of my port. As I pushed it clear, I quickly looked around our positions.
Our three Tigers were still in one piece; one Panther and one Panzer IV were destroyed and burning fiercely, becoming pyres for their crews. Our other armoured comrades were battered but still functioning. The bunkers had been hit, but the bombs had made cracks in the concrete without penetrating, or bounced off the roof into the infantry trench areas. One slit trench of our troops had been decimated, and their bodies, thrown out of their dugouts by the blast, lay smouldering on the snow. Our Flak Wagon, and the other Flak guns, seemed to be still intact.
Behind the bunkers, the bridge was empty now: strewn with debris but still standing. I looked forward to being on the opposite bank at midday, to see the bridge being blown up to frustrate the Red advance. We had about four hours to go. I wiped down the outside of my glass block, and slid back down into my seat. As the morning sky erupted into slabs of red and gold above the eastern ridge, tank destroyers came for us.
‘My God,’ I heard Wilf say in the turret. ‘See these monsters.’
Looking through his gun sight, he had the best view of all of us, but with my binoculars I could observe some true beasts labouring over the crest of the ridge and slumping down with their gun barrels directed at the river. These were the self-propelled guns named the ‘Soviet Union’ or ‘SU’ destroyers: huge 15cm battleship guns mounted on T34 running gear, armoured with colossal front plates and curved gun mantles, bigger than anything we Germans had ever produced. The Russian prisoners called them the ‘cat-hunters,’ because they killed Tigers and Panthers. There were at least a dozen of these things on the ridge, traversing their tracks left and right in plumes of snow as they positioned their fixed guns to sight down on us.
We fired the first shots, I am pleased to say.
Wilf opened fire at once, sending his red tracer straight up the slopes, through the smoke from the burning Sturmoviks, and into the front plate of an SU gun. I saw the round deflect and go corkscrewing off over the ridge, its tracer still glowing. Wilf fired again in barely two seconds, and I had to grudgingly admire the determination of the Luftwaffe pilot acting as our loader, serving and reloading the breech skilfully, despite my hatred of his character. This time, the round hit the SU monster in its track, and threw the drive wheel twenty metres across the snow, dragging track links with it. The SU fired its gun anyway, a green tracer that flipped down from the heights, skidded across the snow for hundreds of metres – and slammed into the side of a Panther, knocking off the slim armour plates that covered the wheel tops.
Wilf laughed, and Helmann joined him, and the MG man beside me did the same. Our Tiger echoed with the stressed, frightened laughter of men facing a massive enemy, and over the laughter there was the suppressed sobbing of the Russian woman chained behind me.
After this release of tension, though, we all shut up – because the other SU beasts began firing down at us. Their shells sparked with white smoke and green tracer, and from their elevated position they took aim at us as if we were ducks sitting on a white pond. They were firing high-explosive, I realised, as I saw one round burst in the snow near us – not with the small thump of anti-tank rounds, but the explosive shock wave of a munitions round. The blast from that high calibre shell rocked our vehicle from one side to the other, and I heard shrapnel hitting our sides with the same force as 75mm shells.
We fought a stand-off duel with these beasts for several minutes. We hit one of them quickly, sending the gun mantle slumping down, and then piercing the front plate beside the tracks. The roof of its hull lifted away, and a vast amount of ammunition exploded out from inside – the big naval shells screaming around across the ridge.
We hit another SU through the front slope, and the whole vehicle began to career down the hill out of control, trailing smoke and burning oil from under its tracks. It accelerated, with the driver obviously dead or paralysed at the controls, bouncing and lifting over the mounds of snow until it rose up over a boulder and flipped onto one side, spilling burning fuel across the white surface. The crew that emerged were shot down by MG f
rom our infantry trenches, no doubt eager for revenge after the Sturmovik assault.
We took hits in return, though. Keeping the Tiger stationary, I looked left and right through my glass, and I saw a Panther in the forward positions in front of us being struck on the turret by one of these huge shells. The explosion caused the whole turret structure to separate from the hull, and flip over onto its side. The exposed turret ring was crammed with the slumped bodies of the crew, the loader still clutching a 75mm shell in his hands. The shell exploded even as he held it, blowing him into pieces which tumbled over the panzer and fell onto the snow. The rest of the crew burned in the hull, covered in the seeping gasoline.
Craning my neck around, I could just see the edge of our bridge bunker being hit repeatedly by these shells, each one sending chunks of concrete up into the crimson-coloured sky. A Flak 20mm was hit, and the two crew were splintered along with their cannon, while their stock of cannon magazines detonated, sending white tracer in a spray across the river.
Another SU was hit by our elevated fire, the great machine retreating a few metres in clouds of smoke and then boiling up in twists of red fire. Now the PAK in the bunkers behind us came to life, and found the range properly, shooting up another of the SUs with shots through the hull nose and the tracks. The top of the ridge was so steep, and the SUs were inclined downwards at such an angle, that our shots were falling on their less exposed upper surfaces, with some creditable results.
One more SU was immobilised, with a shot into its front hull that sent bits of its transmission crashing out in a spray of oil. Its comrades, though, knew our weaknesses, and concentrated their fire on the Panthers. As this frantic exchange of fire ended, a Panther was hit on the front plate in a colossal explosion of metal fragments.
The Panther immediately reversed, its driver clearly seeking to take it away from the line of fire. As it careered backwards past our position, I saw why: the whole frontal glacis plate of the panzer was ripped off and hanging loose, leaving the body of the MG man hanging out of the front, and the face of the driver exposed to the Russian fire. The Panther reversed and skidded, and came to rest with its rear plate up against the wall of one of the bunkers. There, as the driver wriggled and flailed in his seat, it was shot to pieces by more SU fire, splitting the hull and smacking the turret around against the concrete.
I grimaced, clenched my fists, and looked up again at the slope. I was beyond thinking or feeling – I wanted only to know what the next weapon was that would be sent against us. All I saw, as the SU machines paused their fire for a while, was a ragged, scrambling group of infantry – German infantry – emerge from snowdrifts on the lower slope and begin to run down the hill towards us.
These were men who had obviously buried themselves as the battle erupted, now encrusted with snow and possessed with a desire to flee the Russians that evidently overcame their exhaustion and the icicles which clung to their faces and uniforms. Flinging aside their weapons – even the precious heavy machine guns across their shoulders – these desperate scarecrows stumbled through the snow, disappearing as they fell headlong, and dragging themselves out of the drifts in their race for safety.
Behind them, a final Hanomag half-track emerged from under a bank of snow, and sought to plough its way down the slope, with its armoured nose chewing at the mounds. It travelled fifty metres before one of SU rounds caught it, and flung it into the air. As it rose, I saw that it had the red cross of the medical orderlies on the side – it was a heavy-duty ambulance. The hull broke open, and scattered its load of wounded men across the slope – and then crashed on top of them in a cloud of smoke, rolling over and over, each turn crushing another helpless man.
The fleeing infantry broke into a crazy scramble, with men falling behind and stretching out their arms for help while their comrades scrabbled through the snow, in places up to their waists, and then in a drift up to their necks. There was nothing they could do to make progress in that depth, and as they stopped, with only their heads visible, some SU shells burst among them.
I am sure that I was not the only panzer man who closed his eyes, bunched his hands and refused to look at the carnage that took place. When the shelling stopped, I wiped the condensation from my glass block and looked again.
The soldiers buried up to their necks in the snow had all been decapitated.
The naked, severed stumps of their necks projected red above the white surface, still steaming in their final energy.
There followed a moment of low cursing from Helmann, followed by barked commands. The SU monsters on the ridge remained stationary, but snow flew up in spirals as the Stalin tanks came over the crest to join the battle.
The massive, block-shaped glacis plates of the Stalins, the shapes that I had seen before, stood out in horrible clarity now, stark against the snow beneath them and the crimson dawn sky above. Our gunners, always alert, took aim at them as their underbellies rose over the crest, and pierced one under the hull between the tracks. I saw the round punch through the lower plate and emerge from the upper hull, carrying with it the upper hatch cover and the severed limbs of crew men up into the red sky.
That was only one strike, however - and the other massive steel beasts crashed down onto the slopes and took only a moment to get their bearings before heading down for the bridge.
They were in a powerful position above us, while we were static targets. On the other hand, their long gun barrels were lifting and falling as their tracks ploughed across the snow and the pointed hull fronts rose and fell. Their shots against us went wide, their tracer shooting out across the river or slamming into the bunkers with hollow detonations.
Our shells were carefully chosen, timed to strike against the great turrets of the Stalins as they rose and fell, and we blew the turret off the leading attacker as it stormed towards us in a spiral of exhaust fumes. The great turret structure reared up, crackling with fire, and then fell down loose, the gun barrel spinning around as the hull drove on regardless. Another 88mm round shot its track off, and then the Panthers hit it with their 75mm rounds, smashing holes in the prow that had the machine leaving a trail of wheels, track links and burning oil behind it as it finally came to a halt.
The numbers were too great, however, and our ammunition was too limited. Time and again, I heard Helmann and Wilf consulting in the turret, considering whether this shot or that shot was a good use of the few rounds that we had left. More often than not, Helmann held Wilf back from firing, and at other times we shot and had some success against the attackers of the Reich.
The Panthers, too, had their successes, using their static firing platforms to strike at the rolling, tipping Stalin tanks which could not stabilise their barrels against us properly. I saw one Panther rip the track and wheels off a Stalin with three rapid shells, punching in along the lower hull when the vehicle rose up out of the snow. The Stalin went out of control, and turned over onto its roof, while another Panther fired into its other flank, blowing its engine out of the back plate and releasing a wave of fuel that ignited in a flash, brighter than the dawn above the ridge.
The Stalins, however, seemed to have no fear or sense of danger. One came thumping its way up to us across the snow, firing as it reached shallower drifts and its wallowing lessened. One of its rounds smashed into our front plate, and the impact damaged my leg, as the suspension arm beside me rocked back and belted me hard. The pain shot up my spine and made me grunt, and I had my eyes closed in pain as Wilf fired back at this intruder with the 88mm.
When I opened my eyes, the Stalin was on fire in front of us, with its turret dislocated and orange flames licking around it. But another round hit us, and then another, and I heard Helmann shouting through the intercom for me to move our panzer up onto the plain, to get in among the Stalins. I shook myself, but the action sent pain through my neck and cerebellum. I felt heat on my chin, and slowly tasted blood. I felt something in my throat, and I almost choked on a broken tooth.
‘Move the panzer,
you driver,’ Helmann was yelling. ‘We must be mobile, damn you, Faust.’
I looked up, and saw bright, red sky. A Russian armour-piercing round had knocked off my hatch cover, smashing my face with shrapnel but leaving me otherwise untouched. I laughed like a madman, looking up at the sky. I felt Helmann’s boot in my back two or three times, and then I saw our MG man reaching for me over the bulkhead, past the useless instrument panel. He was holding some kind of capsule, with a needle attached, and he plunged it into my arm through my tunic.
‘Kurt?’ I mumbled. ‘Kurt, you’re back. What did they do to you?’
The radio man slapped my face repeatedly. ‘I’m not Kurt. That injection will do you good, Faust,’ he yelled. ‘Now drive us, for God’s sake. We cannot sit here with these Reds around us.’
The injection did me good – a lot of good. Afterwards, I guessed it was a small dose of morphine mixed with a high dose of amphetamine, which was a familiar cocktail in the army for lightly wounded men. It kept them fighting and pain-free – and it certainly did that for me. All the pain in my head and neck subsided, and I spat out another bloody tooth without even feeling it. I found that I seemed to be using the driving controls with astonishing expertise, even if my lurching movements made Helmann shout in protest as we raced up violently onto the plain below the ridge, to meet the JS tanks that were charging down to the river.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 11