The mass of people and materiel moving across the Autobahn was colossal. In any minute, several hundred men women and children would emerge from the shadows of the heath, bunch up on the edge of the road, look quickly left and right as if checking for traffic, and then dash across, disappearing off towards the railroad line in the distance. The sparks and glow of exhausts moved among them, as motorcycles, half-tracks and the few remaining cars and trucks made the crossing too.
The Reds did not attack this point immediately with panzers or troops – but they began a bombardment which burst in slow, random patterns across the Autobahn, scattering groups of people or sending vehicles flying end over end. Nobody knew where the next explosion would fall, or whether they would be the next to be hit, or if they would die or be left behind as wounded, like the many injured troops and civilians who were lying in the shadows on the grassland, crying out not to be abandoned.
Our Panther rejoined the Capo’s Panther and the solitary Panzer IV. The old Panzer IV was screeching as it moved, and fell behind us slowly as its power began to fail. As we moved away from the road, I looked back, and saw the panzer being swallowed in the ranks of people trudging past it. Where once they would have climbed up on it, begging for a ride, now they seemed to know that the vehicle was crippled, and they ignored it in their trek to the West. The Panzer IV commander, the old panzer training man, came running after us, flagging us down.
‘My fuel,’ he shouted.
‘We have no spare fuel,’ I called down. ‘I have barely enough for ten kilometres.’
‘But I have plenty,’ he shouted. ‘I have a full tank.’
We began to reverse back to his machine.
The story was an interesting one: his training unit had been equipped with panzers which had been adapted to run on wood-burning carbon monoxide stoves instead of gasoline. But for several months, gasoline had continued to be delivered, and they had amassed a small reserve. We quickly pumped out every drop of fuel from the Panzer IV tanks, and split it between the Capo’s Panther and mine. It was not a large amount, but increased our range from ten kilometres to fifty kilometres: enough, in a straight line, to cross the railroad and reach the Elbe.
That was provided that we had no detours, climbed no hills, and made no bursts of speed in combat.
I let the Panzer IV’s trainee panzer crew ride on my Panther’s front plate, where the angle meant that only able-bodied people can hold on, and we took several walking wounded and civilians onto the hull top and deck. I put the training instructor himself in the empty radioman’s compartment, crouching on the shattered seat, with an MP40 and instructions to fire it through the broken gun mounting if needed. He seemed pleased enough with the arrangement. Then we headed west, in the semi-darkness, among the stumbling foot columns and the random explosions of the shells.
My gunner rested his face on the gun sight and went still. I suspected he was asleep, but I thought that he deserved it. I stood up in the cupola, as we swayed over the heathland. I could see no sign of a counterattack by the Reds, although we were on the left flank and the land in that direction was empty and open. That did not make me confident. On the contrary, it was as if the Russians were now allowing us to break out from the Kessel, permitting us to stream out into the western plain. But what choice did we have? The Kessel was a trap, a noose. If this open land was another trap, it had not yet snapped shut.
In the darkness, which was broken only by the flash of explosions and fires, accidents happened. We passed a motorcycle that had been run over by a panzer, the rider and the machine visible for one instant in the light of a shell burst, mangled together in the ground. Any functioning motor vehicle that stopped was set upon and stripped of remaining fuel and ammunition. In this situation, with the scarcity of gasoline, horses were becoming more valuable. From my turret, I saw a pair of Wehrmacht troops descend on a civilian two-horse cart, cut the traces and make off riding the horses, leaving the civilians to continue on foot. A senior Luftwaffe officer whose staff car had broken down threatened the driver of a horse-drawn field kitchen with a pistol, demanding a horse for himself. The officer was quickly disarmed by passing troops, and he began to make his way among the civilians, holding a suitcase.
We passed a few isolated, heathland houses, in some cases with occupants standing in the doorways, watching us mutely. In the light of the flares and burning vehicles along the road, we saw that some of these houses had fresh graves near them, and it was said that these were graves of civilians who had been killed by the Russians as they passed through in the days before.
In the distance, to the front, there were flashes and coils of tracer erupting into the sky, which I believed marked the point where the SS King Tigers were spearheading the movement to the West. As we grew closer, the movement of people faltered and slowed, as the vast bulk of the infantry were unwilling or unable to progress into combat. Many troops simply lay on the ground in the shadows, waiting for others to go forward and take part in the fighting for the advance. Among these were many officers, who stood sullenly, like children, their arms folded, refusing to give orders or to discipline their men. The civilian women mocked and cursed these officers, calling out that their menfolk had fought like true Germans. Indeed, it became common to see armed groups of civilian women, wearing helmets and clutching carbines or Russian machine pistols, seeming determined to defend themselves and their children to the last.
Leaving these miserable scenes behind, my Panther approached the head of the column, closer to the sounds of firing and explosions. The Capo’s Panther was just in front of me, and following his exhausts, we entered a plateau crossed by ditches and hedgerows which we in the panzers avoided carefully for fear of losing a track.
In the dim light, we halted at a group of panzer crews, standing around a Jagdtiger – one of the massive self-propelled guns built on the King Tiger platform. The huge vehicle, like a bunker on tracks, was immobilised, emitting thick smoke, and men were syphoning off its remaining fuel.
The panzer crews greeted us with blank faces. By this stage, there were no salutes and formalities, and the distinctions of rank were being lost. There was little interest, too, in the differences between the original units or regiments that we had come from: we were all there at that point in time, and we had to combine to maximise our chances of the breakthrough.
‘You have two Panthers?’ one of them said to us. ‘You will be useful. The railroad is ahead, but there’s a blockade in front of it. If we can get over the railroad here, we drive straight on to the West. I know definitively that the Twelfth Army is there, after the railroad, waiting for us. We have had messengers coming through, confirming this. But if we wait here, the Reds will simply destroy us at daylight.’
‘But why attack the blockade itself?’ the Capo asked. ‘Why not bypass it?’
‘To the North and South are anti-tank ditches and flooded canals. These are things that our forces prepared, to hold back the Russians, and now the Russians are using them. There are Red panzers hidden up and down there too. We could find a way through all that, but it would take hours, and by then the sun will be up. As soon as daylight comes, the Red planes will cut us to pieces. The blockade is not our construction, the Soviets have built it in the past few days. Therefore we believe it is a rushed piece of work, possibly not finished. We must break through it now.’
As we moved up to the front, the Jagdtiger was destroyed with a demolition charge – that massive machine, the equivalent of two Panthers in steel and resources, was simply left burning beside the road.
The forces for attacking the railroad were our two Panthers, a remaining King Tiger, several Stugs and some mobile 20mm Flak panzers which we called the Wirbelwind. These remarkable machines were quadruple 20mm cannon in open turrets on a Panzer IV chassis, suitable for strafing ground targets as well as anti-aircraft fire. Their presence gave me confidence, but the sight of the infantry that was to accompany us was worrying.
We had several doz
en Fallschirmjager, the elite forces that we could trust to give their all. But they were supplemented with Volkssturm men and boys: the under sixteens and over fifties, armed with Panzerfausts and carbines, completely untrained. There were several civilian police units too, and groups of panzer troops with no vehicles, artillery men and Flak gunners who had abandoned their guns in the breakout. Regular Wehrmacht troops were there, and a Pioneer officer brought in another fifty or so from the column at gunpoint, ordering them to fight or face instant execution. This officer was backed up by a roaming gang – that is the word that came to my mind – of Kettenhund men, SS men and Pioneer troops, vicious-looking marauders who radiated a desperation to elude the Russian trap.
Forcing the press-ganged troops forward to join the others, they dragged out one unwilling soldier – a lad of eighteen or so – and executed him with a shot in the head. The others moved into the front line with grim faces.
Dawn would come within an hour – and with it the Red bomber planes and the revelation of the extent of the great column behind us. The officers told me that there were ten or twenty thousand people bunched up here, waiting to cross the railroad to get to the West. Perhaps a quarter of them were civilians or walking wounded. Daylight, surely, would bring a level of destruction on a scale that so far we had not witnessed even in the Kessel.
There was no time for preparation or planning. With the aim of breaching the blockade that guarded the railroad, the single SS King Tiger lurched forward into the dark, with our Panthers following in an arrowhead formation, the Stugs beside us and the two Wirbelwind Flakpanzers following among the mix of infantry behind us.
The railroad was on an embankment on the skyline, lit by the flames of burning vehicles. I could see its wide, straight line running left and right, and at its foot we had been told that the improvised blockade position consisted of bulldozed earth, logs and sandbags. The greatest danger would come when we breasted the railroad itself: as we rose up over the railroad tracks, our lower hulls would be exposed to whatever was beyond for a few seconds – and an alert Russian PAK gunner could put a round through our forward transmission from below.
Above the railroad line, the sky appeared to be tinted grey. Was dawn coming so early? The light suddenly brightened, and a long, intense beam shot up into the sky. Inside my Panther, even in the heat and fumes, we all laughed at the sight of that beam. The Russians had switched on an anti-aircraft searchlight!
‘My God, that will protect them from the mighty Luftwaffe,’ the loader muttered, peering at the sight through his periscope.
‘When was the last time you saw the Luftwaffe?’ the panzer trainer called up from the hull. ‘Was it Christmas, or before?’
It seemed incredible that, with their domination of the sky, the Reds would bother with an aerial searchlight. But then another beam joined the first, and then a third – and I could see that these were extremely powerful lights, sending long shafts of brilliant white light up into the smoky air above the railroad. The enemy strongpoint was still wrapped in shadows below it. As we closed to five hundred metres, and there was no reaction from the blockade, the searchlight beams quivered, moved through the air – and then descended directly on to our panzers.
Our laughter turned in a moment to shouts of pain and alarm. The lights were dazzling, brighter than any light I had seen before, surely more powerful than any normal anti-aircraft beam. They transformed the space in front of us into a wall of blinding fog, in which it was impossible to make out any perspective or dimensions. My driver slowed, and I used the magnetic compass to keep him driving straight ahead, hoping that the other vehicles would do likewise. Fear gripped my stomach and made my hands shake uncontrollably; we were lit up like showground targets, blind and lost. Over the din of our engine, I heard another vehicle move close to us, collide with our flank and then move off. Then the rapid, chattering fire of 20mm cannons told me that the Wirbelwind had moved in front, and was shooting up at the searchlights.
We entered a situation of complete anarchy and destruction, even by the standards of combat that I had seen in the East. We were hit by a PAK round on our front plate, causing our transmission to shriek. At the same time, the blinding wall of light was cut in half, and I could dimly see flashes to our right as the Wirbelwind blasted its cannon along the railroad embankment. My vision was impaired by the light, and my retina held brilliant shapes that prevented me focussing properly. My gunner cursed and shouted that he had the same problem – he could not focus on the gun sight. This was a new form of weapon from the Reds: a light so blinding that it prevented men from using their weapons.
I ordered our driver to steer us to the right, out of the blinding light, into the area of darkness that the Wirbelwind had created. We were hit again by PAK rounds, two slamming into our turret and blowing the periscope glass down onto me. I could now only see to the front, and there I thought I could make out a wrecked searchlight up on the embankment, and two more lights sweeping their beams randomly onto our forces. Machine gun and PAK fire was coming from the blockade point, only a few hundred metres away. I saw the Wirbelwind’s quadruple 20mm cannon tear a row of explosions along the top of the embankment, and then another one of the searchlights exploded in brilliant pieces, and went dark.
The remaining light continued operating, moving up and down the embankment and sweeping its blinding beam over our forces. We almost collided with the SS King Tiger, which was firing with a lowered gun onto the blockade, advancing a few metres between each shot. Unable to see anything else, I ventured my head up out of the cupola.
The battle for the railroad was erupting in fits and starts, as our men and machines threw themselves at the resistance points, cut down by the enemy guns and dazzled by the powerful light. Two Stugs had been destroyed, and their crews were clambering out, shielding their eyes against the light. These men were picked off one by one as they tried to jump clear, by machine guns firing from the blockade. One Stug exploded in flames, sending its tracks and wheels arching through the air for many metres. Our two Wirbelwinds were firing defiantly up onto the railroad line, where the remaining searchlight was flashing its blinding cone back and forth over us. Among all this, our infantry were charging the Soviet blockade, running into the light and explosions in ragged groups.
I gave instructions to my gunner, and aimed our gun roughly at the blockade, and fired our remaining high-explosive rounds into the sandbags and earthen walls. The timber and earth blew up, lifting the Red occupants into the air in a jumble of bodies and debris. A PAK gun fired on us, the tracer deflecting off the front plate just a few metres below me, but then the Capo’s Panther charged past us, firing at zero range, until he rammed the blockade itself with his bow. His Panther’s tracks clawed madly at the mounds of earth, but sank into the debris that our shells had created, becoming stranded. Beside him, the King Tiger moved along the blockade, firing with his lowered gun into each aperture.
I ordered my driver to ram the blockade, and we lurched onto the position, as Red machine gunners shot at us from either side, with their bullets smacking off our armoured hull. My driver used the differential expertly, to rotate the panzer and crush the dug-in positions – and then, on my order, we began to mount the embankment beyond the blockade.
That last high-powered searchlight began to turn onto us, and I saw that this was a device mounted on a T34 chassis, with a huge projection disc bigger than any searchlight I had seen, even in the Reich. We reached the ridge of the embankment and rammed the machine before it turned its beam fully onto us, knocking it sideways. The T34 hull span off down the slope on the other side of the ridge, with the powerful beam now directed west towards the Red lines. Perhaps this saved us, because a storm of tracer rounds flew up at us from the land beyond, but all the shots went wide. The searchlight panzer caught fire, and began to burn, as its massive lens burst open and the light died. My Panther gripped the stones of the railroad line itself, and I felt the thump of each railroad girder as we passed
over the top – and then we crashed down onto the obverse slope, where we knew nothing about the forces ranged against us.
We ploughed to a halt on a slope of loose stones. My cupola periscopes were cracked and dusty, making forward vision difficult. When I was sure that we were below the skyline, so that I was less of a target for snipers, I went up through the cupola to see what was in front of us.
Dawn was close – that much was evident. Not the false, blinding dawn of the power searchlights, but a blue mark across the sky. Below us, Red infantry were retreating, running from us over the earthworks which we Germans had built to defend the zone. In the distance, as the land fell away to the East, I saw a corridor of flames and explosions which surely marked the limit of the Twelfth Army’s advance. If we could make it to that corridor, we would have a chance of making it onward to the Elbe.
The dawn light rose, as the remaining vehicles and infantry of our assault group reared up over the railroad lines and slithered down the slope. None of the Stugs had survived; one Wirbelwind was intact, and another joined us as a chassis tractor with its open turret blasted away. The SS King Tiger laboured over the ridge in the grey light, with flames licking around its engine bay. The huge machine shuddered and ground to a halt, its tracks sinking into the loose stones, as its crew extinguished the flames.
The infantry had survived at a rate of perhaps forty percent or less. The Fallschirmjager came in ones and twos over the railroad, shouldering their guns and with their faces set under masks of dust. The Volkssturm people came supporting each other, trailing their Panzerfausts behind them, boys carrying the old men and vice versa. The Wehrmacht troops came over with their Kettenhund gang behind them, the soldiers reduced to a platoon and their escorts down to two men. With this ragged bunch of men and machines, we had crossed the last barrier that remained before the Elbe and our salvation.
But what of the Capo?
The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945 Page 11