The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945

by Wolfgang Faust

  The Panzer IV in front of us had shed its tracks, which were looped around it in ragged pieces. The panzer crew were clambering out on the hull, gesturing to me to accept them on board. As I shouted to them to climb on, though, figures emerged from trenches around us: figures of men in Red Army padded jackets, and they began to swarm over the Panzer IV. In moments, the panzer crew were shot down – one man who jumped clear being stabbed through the neck with a bayonet by one of these Ivan panzer hunters. My hull gunner and main gunner both fired their MGs, and shot the men on the panzer to pieces – both the Soviets and the dead bodies of the panzer crew. The adversaries lay jumbled on top of each other, in the light of the flames, their blood mingling on the armour plate.

  As soon as this danger was overcome – Red panzers burst in among us.

  These were not the ordinary T34s, I saw immediately, as one of these monsters appeared through the smoke and began to traverse its squat, oblong turret onto us. These were Josef Stalin types – the equal of a King Tiger, with a slow but fatal main gun more powerful even than an 88mm. I gave the bearing of one of them to my gunner.

  ‘JS!’ my gunner muttered in my headphones, and I felt the turret twitch as he traversed our 75mm onto the Russian. I dropped back inside of the turret, where peering out through the periscopes I could barely see the Stalin, about one hundred metres distant, shrouded in the smoke. That massive Red panzer would normally stand back and pick its enemies off at distances of two kilometres or more – but in the dark and smoke, it needed to come to close quarters to be able to see its prey. Its colossal main gun was gradually turning onto us, but our traverse was quicker, and our driver aided it by using the track differential to swivel our hull so that our gun came into alignment more rapidly. While the Ivan turret was still turning, we fired. The round deflected off its armour and disappeared into the smoke. Beside me, my 75mm loader worked like a grim dervish on the breech while the gun fumes filled the turret. We fired again. I blinked, wiped my eyes and stared at the JS.

  ‘That round,’ I said. ‘Is it –’

  ‘Yes,’ the gunner muttered, squinting through his gun sight. ‘It’s stuck in the armour.’

  Our 75mm projectile was sticking out of the JS turret armour, still smoking, like the horn on a devil.

  ‘Reverse!’

  We slammed backward, crashing through the wall of a barn, as the JS fired on us. Its round flashed in front of us, and flew off across the open heath towards the Spree Forest. We were at point blank range with this Stalin panzer, blinded by smoke, in a zone that we had no knowledge of. The only thing we knew for certain was that we had to get through the town of Halbe, and this Stalin was barring our path.

  The Capo’s Panther was nowhere to be seen – and where were our King Tigers? How would we break past these huge Ivan machines into the town, and out to the West? Every thought, every breath was punctuated by the detonation of mortar rounds exploding between us and the Stalins. If we could not break past them, the Kessel exit would be sealed again and its hundred thousand inhabitants would meet a savage destiny.

  The Russian JS panzer was notoriously slow to reload its huge gun, having, we believed, a two-part shell system in which the projectile and propellant were loaded separately, as on a battleship. In the time it took, my loader replenished our breech again, and I ordered my gunner to fire on the Stalin which had shot at us – but to hit him in the running gear, not the hull or turret. It was a difficult shot, in the drifting smoke, with only the front of the Stalin’s track visible as a target. We fired once – and the round deflected off the edge of the glacis by the track.

  We were reloaded and primed in seconds, and our second shot blew the right front track clean off the Stalin’s drive wheel, making the machine rock on its axis. Before its crew could react, I ordered our driver to charge the Stalin, and to veer around so that we were at its rear, where the armour plate was thinner over the engine. With mortar rounds bursting around us, we crashed out of the barn and over to the Stalin’s right, then slowed and rotated around so that our gun was pointing at the Red panzer’s back plate. I saw the Stalin try to heave itself around on one track, but this was slow and our gunner was faster on his final traverse.

  Our precious armour-piercing shell smashed into the Stalin’s thin, back armour. The light from the overhead flares was so clear that I could see our round pierce the metal in a spray of dislodged fragments. The round deflected off something inside there, and came shooting up vertically out of the engine grilles, followed by a plume of sparks. The grilles flew apart, and a flash of flame lit up the whole Stalin, turning to oily smoke which coiled in tentacles around the vehicle as it shuddered and tried to move.

  We began to reverse from it, conserving our ammunition, but that Stalin crew was not done with us. As we turned to drive past the wrecked machine, I saw its hatches open and men climb out, calmly and orderly: five men, some armed with machine pistols. Our hull gunner fired and knocked two of them down, but the armed men dodged towards us, getting so close to our flank that I lost sight of them beside the Panther. We began to accelerate away – but immediately crashed through the smoke into an earth mound which blocked our backward progress. Our cursing reached a crescendo of obscenity as our dish wheels slid while we tried to reverse over the mound, our hull up in the air and our tracks throwing out earth as our weight took us back down. As we landed with a crash, I heard the screech of our engine cut out and die.

  Our Panther had stalled, and we were stationary.

  None of us needed to curse our driver – he knew exactly what to do. He worked the starter lever, trying to engage the start motor, making the system whine but not catch, each sound tearing at our hearts. I saw our loader’s eyes fill with tears, and I had no words to console him. Were we now to be stranded here, and forced to join the helpless swarms of people on foot rushing through the maelstrom of Halbe?

  ‘Please . . .’ our gunner said. ‘Come on, please . . .’

  ‘It won’t catch,’ our driver muttered. ‘It won’t –’

  I heard noises on the rear deck of the Panther.

  Were they German troops, climbing aboard in the middle of the battlefield?

  I peered through the rear periscope, and caught sight of a Russian tank crewman in his ribbed helmet, smashing at our engine grilles with the butt of his machine pistol. The verdamm Reds wanted vengeance on us for destroying their fine Stalin panzer. I fired my pistol through the small port in the turret rear intended for this purpose, but the angle was wrong, and without engine power we could only turn the turret slowly with the hand crank. If the Reds put one bullet into our fuel pipes, or one grenade under the grilles, our Panther would never start again. I slid open my cupola hatch, took my MP40 from the turret wall, and pointed the gun out over the top. I realised it was no use shooting like that – my bullets would surely go through our own grilles. With no choice, I heaved myself out, and came face to face with a Red tank crewman, who was trying to prime a flare pistol, pointing it down at the engine covers.

  I shot him, and he tumbled off the deck – but his comrade was on top of me. Unarmed, the man smashed me in the face with his fist, and I tasted thick blood in my mouth. I shot at him wildly, and saw him jump from the Panther onto the earth. Down there, a gang of our troops leaped forward – not only troops, but women too, armed with rifles and pistols. They set upon this man and cut him to pieces with shots and blows – until one woman, armed with a civilian shotgun, administered the final blast to his face. At the same time, our engine rumbled and caught, and the Panther came to life again under me.

  ‘Comrade, take us with you!’ the ground troops shouted over the din.

  I could not deny the ground soldiers and civilians the chance to ride with us – the approach to Halbe would be murderous on the back of a panzer, but if they wished to take the danger, so be it. And their close-quarters protection against marauding Russian infantry would be welcome. With this clutch of half a dozen armed fighters on our rear deck, I climbed b
ack into the turret. We rounded the earth embankment and moved off towards Halbe itself in search of our other panzers and the route to the West.

  Coming through the outlying farm buildings, with me peering through the periscopes from inside the turret, I saw quickly how our SS King Tigers were engaged. The lights of flames and the parachute flares were still bright, and in that flickering glow I saw that our heavy panzers were fighting another row of Stalins. These Red panzers were dug into the ground on the edge of the village itself, with only their turrets above the earth. I could see three of them, with their block-shaped turrets black against the flames behind them. Our King Tigers were shooting them up from a range of less than one kilometre, blowing up clouds of soil as their high-explosive shells exploded around the emplaced Stalins. One Tiger was evidently firing armour-piercing, and I saw the tracer shells corkscrew off from the side of a Stalin’s turret in the drifting smoke. On the other side of the Tigers, I thought I could make out the Capo’s Panther, behind a ridge, firing intermittently at the Stalins.

  Behind those few Red panzers, the town of Halbe stood in flames, with artillery rounds exploding over it in starbursts that sent roof tiles and chimneys whirling for hundreds of metres. I guessed that bombardment was the last of our artillery using its ammunition to break up the Soviet positions in the town. The Russian artillery, though, was now laying down a thick screen of explosions in front of the town, daring us to run the gauntlet of shrapnel even if we could defeat the Stalins. I did not anticipate that our Panthers would be of great use in this initial fight against the Stalins – that would take the King Tigers. Besides, I didn’t need to count our ammunition – I knew it well enough: barely twenty rounds of armour-piercing remaining, and ten rounds of high-explosive. That would need to last until we were through the town, over the land to the West and inside the Twelfth Army corridor.

  I kept my Panther concealed in the rubble of a collapsed farm house, where the rafters and slates covered our profile, and, with our riders still cowering on our rear deck, I considered how to approach the town.

  I could see four King Tigers in all, firing on the three Stalins, their higher rate of fire undermined as an advantage by the ultra-low position of the Red panzers in the ground. The Tigers were having no success, and they were taking hits on their front plates from those massive battleship guns in the Stalin machines. One such hit struck a King Tiger on the gun mantle, and I saw in an instant that the tracer shell deflected down and hit the deck hatches under the barrel. A hatch flew off into the air, and then a jet of sparks erupted from the deck. I shuddered to think of that Soviet warhead screaming around the inside of our panzer, ricocheting off the interior walls and carving a path through any human body that it touched. I had looked inside the hulks of many destroyed panzers – ours and the Russians – and I knew what the process did to flesh and bone. The King Tiger’s turret hatches blew open – and in a moment its ammunition exploded, sending a helix of flame up from the open vents. Even as the panzer was enveloped in its burning gasoline, the other King Tigers took their revenge, focussing all their fire for a furious ten seconds on one of the embedded Stalins.

  My gunner chuckled to himself. With his telescopic sight, he had a better view than me – but even I could see the Stalin hit repeatedly by three, then four shells, until a great scab of metal broke away from the turret and span off across the ground. The broken shell of the turret exploded, throwing the crew members up into the air amid sparks and flames. They had scarcely fallen to earth before the King Tigers turned their fire to the second Stalin, which was hit immediately in the gun barrel where it joined the turret.

  That Stalin’s barrel slumped, and the huge machine began to reverse back out of its low emplacement. The overhead flares turned to orange and green, and in this lurid illumination we saw the Stalin reverse a few metres, exposing its upper hull to our Tigers as it went back up the gradient. One 88mm round punctured the forward hull, and another ripped open the engine deck as it rose into the air. The Stalin slumped back down into its trench, with crew men beginning to drag themselves out of the hatches, their clothing and helmets on fire. I thought the Tigers had finished with them – but one of the Waffen SS gunners insisted on firing a high explosive round which exploded centrally on the Stalin.

  My gunner chuckled again.

  The Red crewmen climbing out of the hatches were severed in half by the explosion – their torsos blasted completely away, leaving only the stumps of their bodies jammed in the hatch openings. Its escape routes blocked, and its hull shot to pieces, the Stalin began to burn.

  The third Stalin panzer was outnumbered now by three to one, but still it kept firing on the King Tigers. I had to admire its commander when, with 88mm rounds smashing off its turret, the panzer reared up and burst out of its dug-in emplacement onto the open ground itself. There was to be no retreat for this hero of the Soviet Union, even if nobody ever knew his name or his actions. He was going down defiantly, taking his machine and his crew with him.

  That was achieved in a few seconds, as the Stalin began to race towards the three King Tigers, clearly intent on ramming one of them. The Tigers shot his tracks off with high explosive, and, as the Stalin careered sideways across the heath, they stood silently and watched as the Red panzer crashed into a crater, flipped over slowly, and came to rest upside down, its turret in the earth now and its wheels in the sky. Flames licked around it slowly, but the King Tigers were already moving towards it, then past it - and then their lumbering profiles moved into the outskirts of the town itself.

  My Panther followed, tucking in behind the Capo’s Panther as he too emerged from his concealment and joined the column. Behind us, I saw through the periscopes in the glow of the flares and burning vehicles that hundreds of people were already following us closely – troops, Wehrmacht, SS and civilians, in cars, trucks on foot and on Hanomags – as our breakout column slowly pushed ahead into the chaos of Halbe town.

  *

  The Battle at Halbe

  Halbe was once like a thousand small towns dotted across Germany: timbered houses, merchants’ halls, a market square, a church, a simple railroad station. Its buildings had been the homes of well-to-do farmers and dealers, neat and square. On this late April night, it was illuminated by parachute flares, and by the flames erupting from its tiled roofs and timber window shutters.

  I went up out of the cupola to see better and to guide my driver. The first thing that I saw, in the gardens of the houses on the outskirts, were the bodies of dead civilians strewn about everywhere – twenty or thirty people of all ages, who seemed to have been caught by shell fire. We passed these pale bodies, and followed the other panzers between the houses into the main street of the town.

  As we halted there, I took in the scene.

  Our King Tigers were positioned along the main street, their turrets level with the upper windows of the old buildings. The Capo’s Panther was in front of me. From behind us, German troops and civilians were starting to stream through the gaps in the houses, and emerge into this main street, huddling close to the panzers. Some troops, those who retained combat discipline and were armed, moved slowly along the building frontages, checking for signs of Red infantry. These men exchanged fire with Russians in the first houses – shooting through the windows and throwing in grenades to clear them out. Each shot and explosion made the civilians huddle closer to the panzers – and not only the civilians; many German troops were unarmed and simply following us as non-combatants, with no interest in sharing the fighting. These men – some walking wounded, but many able-bodied – let their comrades do the dangerous work while they stayed back in the shadow of the panzers.

  Overhead, the drifting parachute flares began to burn themselves out, and no more were fired from beyond the town. This meant that the Reds knew we had captured the place, and they wanted to give us no advantage of light. The fighting in the houses took place in a renewed darkness, lit by flames and gun flashes, with men scrambling among the wrecka
ge of the house fronts and doorways.

  I saw the German infantry drag the remaining Reds out by their collars and belts, throwing them onto the cobblestones and surrounding them. To save ammunition, they killed the prisoners with their rifle butts, boots and with entrenching spades, clubbing and stabbing them to death. The civilians peered around the panzers to witness this killing – old men, women and children too. By the time this was done, this end of the street was littered with mangled Red corpses, visible in the fires of the burning buildings.

  With the street secured, it was the stage to move on and through the town to the West. Looking behind us, I could make out a great river of people on foot: horses, carts and unarmoured vehicles, bulging up in this bottle neck of the main street. As the King Tigers moved ahead, screened by the combatant infantry, our two Panthers moved off slowly after them, and the mass of people to our rear followed too. At first, they stayed behind our Panther, but then in a few metres many of them ran past us, weaving between the bodies along the street, stumbling from one panzer to the next – until the whole street was packed with thousands of people on foot, all rushing towards the other side of the town.

  When this surge of people was at its height, and the street was a dense, moving river of human heads, swirling forwards between the panzers like islands in a flood – at this point, the Red artillery opened fire on the town.

  Of course, the Reds had their observers hidden nearby, communicating the situation to their commanders, and they had plotted the coordinates of the main street carefully in advance. Even so, the bombardment that they unleashed on the street was merciless and devastating in its accuracy.

  The first shell exploded behind us, throwing a large number of people into the air and sending broken cobble stones whirling along the narrow transit like missiles. The shells burst in a calculated line going forward, from the rear of the column towards the front. The explosions ripped the tightly-packed crowd apart, sending some bodies crashing against the house fronts and others through the shattered windows of the storefronts. I caught sight of a soldier and a civilian woman, blasted off their feet and blown into a shop, where they lay among the burning goods while the building caught fire around them.