Around us, the Panthers and even the surviving Panzer IV were moving too, because the Stalins were so close that to be static was to invite destruction. The Panthers rolled out of their emplacements, then traversed skilfully to meet the threat, their exhausts flaring and their muzzle brakes streaming with smoke as they began firing.
The Panzer IV came up onto the plain and stayed there, traversing and firing rapidly, a panzer design from the 1930’s suddenly exposed to the weapons of the future. It loosed off a series of rounds, which I saw with my newly energised vision. Then I saw the little panzer break apart as Stalin shells tore up its hull, breaking off its turret cladding and rocking the brave machine over on its side. The turret blew off, as the Stalin shells that destroyed it pierced its sides and exited out of the empty turret ring, setting off the fuel in its rear tanks. Long plumes of burning gasoline span after the exiting rounds, turning the snow into a vaporous mass.
The Panthers fought back calmly, rationally, seeking their prey with their long-barrelled 75mm guns, and picking off weak points in the Stalin tanks’ armour. I weaved the Tiger across the plain, watching a JS blow apart in front of me, a German round splitting the lip between its turret and hull, and exiting out of the engine deck in a spray of burning fuel.
Wilf in our turret hit one JS, and then another, but our rounds deflected from their oblong turrets without piercing them. We hit a third Stalin, blowing off the gun mantle and putting another round into its hull side as it span around. Plumes of fire issue from its broken turret as our round ricocheted within there before exploding.
At the same time, though, we took our losses.
The Tiger on our right was hit through the turret side, and the shell exited up through the commander’s cupola, dragging with it the black-uniformed torso of the commander himself. The panzer was hit in the wheels next, and several of the great steel discs flew away behind it as the vehicle lurched over onto its side, coming to rest at an angle which exposed its belly plate to the Stalins. The Red tanks shot into this target repeatedly, until the rounds punching through from the underside shot away the entire turret, and explosions erupted from the empty ring space.
With our two remaining Tigers and a handful of Panthers, we fought the Stalin attack to a standstill. I drove the Tiger with the clumsy confidence of a man stimulated by drugs, taking it from one part of the battlefield to another, moving and halting for Wilf to fire off a number of shots at the Russian machines. Even when the Stalins were immobilised, they continued to fire at us, using their tanks as metal bunkers amid the snow.
One such tank shot at us with a maniacal speed, its tracer rounds flashing past us as we manoeuvred around it to put a shell in from its side. Our 88mm round went exactly centre, just above the snow-covered tracks. The turret hatch lifted up and detonating ammunition spiralled out into the red-tinged sky, adding to the smoke pouring across the stained, rutted snow. Even then, the driver’s hatch opened and a crew man emerged, still in his protective headgear, holding a machine pistol. He fired on us with the little gun, the bullets pattering on our front armour, until our hull MG man brought him down with a single shot. Every round had to count now, had to find its mark; while every manoeuvre and evasion used up our dwindling fuel.
I lost track of time in that fight, with my head spinning from the amphetamines and my body unaware of pain. I noticed, with a strange detachment, that the sky was whitening, and the sun was now looming over the ridge above us. It was a fierce, crimson sun, casting jagged shadows from the peaks, and lighting the scattered wrecks of panzers that burned around us.
In its light, the Stalins withdrew up the slope, reversing rapidly, firing as they left. Our 75mm PAK in the bunkers caught one of them with repeated hits as it lurched backwards in the snow, smashing off the very tip of its pointed hull. The Red tank kept on reversing, with two crewmen visible inside the hull through the split-open front. Wilf was unable to resist the temptation: he fired directly into the exposed compartment. Cool as always, he had selected high-explosive, and the detonation of the shell deep inside the confined steel box blew out the driver and machine-gunner from the fractured hull, sending them cartwheeling across the snow, trailing smoke. The Stalin’s ruptured compartment became an inferno of orange flames, in which other men were visible, struggling and writhing, until the vehicle was enveloped in its own smoke.
The firing stopped. The sky darkened to a blue steel colour, in which the ascendant sun was a red disc, issuing out bands of fiery light. I guessed that the next wave of the Red assault would be barely a few minutes away.
*
This lull was full of rapid activity in our ranks. Our two Tigers checked ammunition and fuel: we had thirty rounds between us, and enough fuel for ten minutes driving, and then to reverse across the bridge. Our four surviving Panthers had similar reserves, we learned over the radio, and the PAK officers ran down from the bunkers for a brief consultation beside our hull.
They still had substantial reserves of armour-piercing, and the mortar battery behind the bunker line had not yet fired a shot. The Flak guns had reasonable reserves, but the infantry in their slit trenches were low on everything – ammunition, spirit and strength.
Helmann regrouped our vehicles into a ragged half-circle around the crossing point, with the bunkers literally at our backs, the steel bridge glinting in the red sunlight.
In all the activity, and the grinding of gears, the rattle of the machines as we positioned the panzers, I heard the Russian woman behind me murmur from beside my ear.
‘All this destruction, what is the purpose?’
Our radio man glanced at her with a frown, evidently not hearing her words but concerned at her communication with me.
‘We are defending Europe,’ I said to her.
‘Like this?’ She laughed bitterly – then, seeing the radio man look at her again, she sank back to her crouching position under the turret.
My reply to her had been instinctive, a slogan but a genuinely felt one, the reason that we had come to this country and unleashed the slaughter we brought. The drugs in my system were still active, and I felt confident, strangely invulnerable. The radio man grinned at me – and offered me another amphetamine boost, this time in the form of a Pervitin tablet in a foil wrapper. These nitrate pills were widespread in our forces, and I crunched this one between my teeth and swallowed it.
‘Panzer sweets!’ our MG man laughed, taking two for himself.
My vision became narrower, but more acute, and I saw the red sunlight among the fires on the snow in a brilliant hue that I had not noticed before. The hairs on my scalp bristled. My sense of smell also became more acute, and the reek of explosive and fuel in the hull was painful. I raised my face to the open hatch to gulp some fresh air. I could see up to the ridge top, and the SU self-propelled guns up there were manoeuvring to the left and right, as if making way for a new presence.
With my binoculars, I studied the ridge, and in a moment called a warning up to Helmann that the Reds were attacking again.
‘Ja,’ he murmured, ‘I see them too. Katyushas again, but many of them. Fire on them when they stop moving, gunner,’ he said to Wilf. ‘Use high explosive, we have more of that.’
‘Sir,’ Wilf said.
‘Just one more hour!’ Helmann exhorted his crews over the radio. ‘We must hold for one more hour, then our reinforcements will be on the river, and we will withdraw.’
Another hour of this fury? An hour of Katyushas?
The Katyushas, I saw through my field glasses, were mounted on tracked carriers which had laboured over the ridge, belching exhaust. The vehicles carried sets of launcher racks loaded with finned rockets, aiming them crudely by pointing the vehicles’ noses down the slope at us, and then angling the racks up and down by hand. As they did this, Wilf immediately fired on them, and his tracer tore into a pair of these machines as the crews were making their adjustments. Their rockets detonated on the racks, and a colossal fireball blew up over the vehicles, obliterating them and th
eir teams. The fire expanded, coiling into many spirals that flexed, rose and fell as it spread, causing the surrounding trucks to scatter frantically out of the way.
The Russians set off smoke flares to conceal their activity, and in moments, the upper part of the ridge was shrouded in a thick, brown smoke. Our PAKS in the bunkers shot into the smoke, but apparently without hitting anything, and we held our fire, the smokescreen was so dense. Even through the smoke, though, the flickering glow of that strange fire continued to burn and expand.
‘Scheisse,’ Helmann muttered. ‘That is gasoline jelly.’
‘What is that?’ I heard the Luftwaffe pilot say, his voice trembling.
‘Gasoline and diesel in a viscous form, mixed with tyre rubber,’ Helmann said, without emotion. ‘It will stick to anything, and it burns for hours.’
The pilot began praying to himself, until Helmann told him to shut up.
‘They will have observers lower down on the slopes,’ Helmann said to us all. ‘They will fire through the smoke and –’
As he said the words, the first of the Katyusha projectiles came screaming down the hillside towards us. Even to my drugged and over-stimulated senses, the rockets were a spectacular and terrifying sight. They shot out of the brown smoke in salvos of a dozen, the whole salvo taking barely a few seconds. The smoke formed into horizontal tornados in their slipstream, filled with the sparks that flew from the base of the long, dart-shaped weapons themselves. The projectiles flew wide at first, shooting way off along the river bank north of the bridge, and exploding there in a wall of coiling fire that grew to the height of a church tower, covering hundreds of metres of land. The observers were quick to correct this, however, and the next round of salvos came down on the area around the bridge.
We were all brave men in that panzer, but I was not the only one, I am sure, who pleaded with fate to spare him the impact of these dreadful flames. I was glad that our female prisoner could not see the attack; but to hear the screech of the rockets around us, and to inhale the stench of their rubberised fuel were bad enough.
Some rockets flew over our heads, and I heard Helmann say that they hit the opposite bank behind us. Others caught a Panther on the outer edge of our group, and the whole vehicle was consumed in a ball of those boiling flames. Death for that crew must have been by roasting, as the fires intensified and burned, and the blazing, sticking liquid dripped down into the hull through any vent or crack.
One storm of rockets exploded directly in front of us, and I saw the finned tubes disintegrate and release their incendiary load, which spread out in a nightmarish web of burning tendrils that seemed to probe the landscape for a victim to consume. I reversed at an angle away from the flames, and the change in position gave me a fuller viewpoint of the effect of the rockets on our defences.
The burning Panther was a dim outline in its pillar of flames. The other Panthers were standing firm, as was our fellow Tiger – but the bunkers themselves were on fire from the Katyusha strikes. One had its roof ablaze, and burning liquid was gushing down into the embrasures. I could see the PAK crews in there, working with extinguishers to preserve their guns. The other bunker was on fire all down one wall, and the flames had splashed onto a Flak position also. The crew were rolling in the snow, covered in fire, and the 20mm tracer rounds were shooting wildly as they detonated. Behind the bunkers, the river itself was on fire, as the incendiary material floated on the water, sending up clouds of steam while the flames expanded from one bank to the other. The bridge itself was still standing, some of its uprights drenched in flames like some kind of demonic, burning symbol rising over us.
I straightened the panzer’s alignment, and looked up again at the ridge.
One more salvo of Katyushas came down, setting the ground around us ablaze, but sparing our panzers. I began to have hope that this final hour might be survivable, that Helmann’s plan might be workable. After all, if we could survive this, could we not survive anything they might throw against us? Wasn’t our Tiger still in one piece, and still running?
The Katyusha launchers fell silent, and beyond the gasoline flames, the brown smokescreen was thinning in the morning breeze. As the smoke dissipated, shapes appeared within it, and I recognised the low, squat outlines of the Stalin tanks, lumbering down the slope again towards us. These were new, fresh vehicles, too, painted in grey-white winter camouflage, the red star still proudly displayed, and showing no signs of recent action. I counted twenty, then thirty of these monsters – and then I gave up counting, because the slopes were full of the machines, each with its pale paint and red star, each with its long barrel dipping and rising as they ploughed through the snow towards us.
Thirty – or forty? Or more? Against two Tigers, a handful of Panthers and some PAK in bunkers? Even if we held this wave off from the bridge, surely the Reds had another fresh company up there on the ridge, and another after that, while we had only ourselves, and our almost depleted ammunition.
‘Forty-five minutes,’ Helmann said. ‘I believe the first of our armour reinforcements are already on the western bank.’ I heard him swivelling around to check 360 degrees with his periscopes. ‘Yes, we have new panzers on the western side,’ he said triumphantly. ‘And more than that – yes, I told you! We have Stukas with cannons.’
Stukas? With cannons?
‘Yes, I see them,’ the Luftwaffe pilot yelled. ‘They are coming in low. Shoot well, lads. Shoot them up for us, I beg you.’
Now I saw the shadows of the Stukas racing across the snow from behind us: black, crooked shapes outlined by the overhead sun. Then the aircraft themselves appeared over our gun barrel. Six magnificent Stukas, each with a pair of long cannon slung under its wings – the same weapon that our pilot friend had been flying when he crashed beside us. I saw the planes advance, their gull wings clearly shown from behind, and the aircraft seemed to float in the air as they swooped around to attack the Red armour from the sides. In moments, the Stukas were right over the Ivan mass, and they began firing their cannon.
I was astonished at the effect.
The Stuka guns were able to fire down on the great Stalins, onto the hull and turret roofs, and above all into the engine decks to hit the thinly shielded vents over the power plant. The aircraft swooped in their distinctive, floating way, with the tracer cannon rounds firing in bursts which were short but intense. When the tracer hit the turret walls, I saw the rounds deflect off in corkscrew patterns, but where they punched through the upper surfaces or the grilles, they penetrated with the tell-tale puff of metal fragments as the shell entered the vehicle.
One Stalin erupted in flames and span around sideways in the snow, and a Panther finished the task with a 75mm round into its flank which caused the Red’s gun barrel to slump into the snow as it burned. Another Stalin had its track shot away by the Stukas, and as the track links whirled around through the air, the tank collided at speed with one of its comrades, both becoming jammed together in deep snow. As the two crews began climbing out, the first men to emerge were hit by another Stuka’s burst of cannon, which left the men slumped in the hatches, obstructing the exit of those still inside. Those two tanks had their engine covers blown off completely, and pieces of the engines were shot out, wreathed in burning oil.
I saw one more JS hit repeatedly, with lines of tracer flying through the forward hull roof. The hull and turret hatches opened, and thick smoke trailed out as the vehicle continued to charge forward, obviously unable to stop. It careered into a mound of snow, lifted onto its side and rolled onto its turret, which sank into the snow. Static, with its belly plate facing up and its tracks still running around uselessly, it was an easy target, and the following Stuka hammered a line of shells into its underside, causing a burst of flames to erupt around it.
‘You see?’ our pilot shouted from the turret. ‘You see what the Stuka can do? See the Reds break up.’
Indeed, the massed charge down the gradient by the Stalins was becoming confused, with some vehicles vee
ring off to the side in evasive action, and others colliding as they sought to avoid the hail of shells from the sky.
‘Don’t fire until they’re closer,’ Helmann ordered. ‘Every shell of ours must count now. Thirty minutes more.’
My heart was pounding with a sense of impending victory, as much as with the amphetamines surging through my system. After all our struggles, Helmann was going to be proved correct. The Reds would be held off, the bridge would be denied them, and our forces massing on the western bank would prevent them crossing here indefinitely. It was all, ultimately, worthwhile – all the shooting, the flames, the shattered bodies and spilled blood.
‘Go on, my friends,’ the pilot shouted, and I heard him open the loader’s hatch, perhaps to get a better view of this rare triumph of the Luftwaffe. ‘Go on!’ he yelled from up there.
Then I realised that the success of the Stukas was purely temporary – and the bridge was in danger after all.
Our Flak began to fire, in long, weaving lines of tracer behind the passing Stukas, and by craning my neck I could just see, coming behind the German aircraft from the north, a formation of planes in the distinctive brown of the Red Air Force. These were not Sturmoviks, but true fighter planes; their speed was staggering as they raced in behind the bigger Stukas and began to fire, with the flashes of guns coming from their wings and propeller cones. They were so fast that they were through the Stukas within seconds – and now it was the German air attack which was broken up with fire.
Of the four Stukas still overhead, at an altitude of barely two hundred metres, one was set on fire immediately, with long streams of burning fuel pouring back from its wings. It rolled upside down and tumbled to earth, crashing onto one of the Stalins that had tried to swerve away from the air attack. The Stalin kept travelling, with pieces of burning aircraft trailing from it, drenched in the blazing kerosene fuel from the Stuka, until the tank ground to a halt and rocked as it also burned.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 12