Winter Storm

by John Schettler

  “But what if they get a lot of these, Kurt?” said Hellmann. “I heard we had trouble at Mtsensk a while back.”

  “Then I will get to kill a lot of them.” Knispel smiled. “Frankly, that is all they can do—build so many tanks that they smother us. But where? Don’t we have most of their factories by now?”

  The other tank crewmen laughed at that, but no one knew that the Soviets would build merely 50,000 of these tactically inferior tanks, and possibly win the war with them by so doing.

  *

  The following morning Knispel was going to get to test his pronouncements personally when his battalion moved up the main road through the orchards flanking the small farming town of Octabyrskiy. The road ahead was thick with mud, and the heavy Lion’s only made the situation much worse as they struggled on through. After three kilometers of toil, taking more than an hour, they reached the town of Malakhovo, nestled against the tree-sewn banks of a river to the west, and fringed by orchards to the east where the main road wound its way around the town. The terrain beyond was farmland, disappearing into yet more woodland ahead.

  The Russians could see the Germans were slowly prying open a wedge along this road, and that morning they determined to do everything possible to close it. Model’s 3rd Panzer was on the left, now fighting well west of Malakhovo, and Langermann’s 4th Panzer was on the far right, engaged with the infantry of 3rd Motorized Division about 5 kilometers east of the main road.

  Up that road came Knispel, riding with the vanguard of Schwerepanzer 101, and he was soon to be treated like a most unwelcome guest. The Russian 5th Tank Brigade now came charging out of the grey rain streaked dawn, surging down the road from the north, and threw itself right on Westernhagen’s heavy battalions. The Russian unit was known as the ABC Brigade, because of the names of the three battalion commanders: Antonov, Borisov and Cherkin. It did not know what it was about to encounter, and the Lions roared, most opening up at under 700 meters due to limited visibility, except for one tank, commanded by a ragged Sergeant with a very keen eye.

  Kurt Knispel was keeping a close eye on the fringes of the town as his platoon column moved up. He was looking at the condition of the streets, their width and layout, the nature of the buildings there, and thinking how he might maneuver to that side if the situation should warrant. He was in 2nd company, and soon heard the crackle of a warning over his headset earphones—enemy tanks ahead! It was like a dinner bell ringing in his mind, and he smiled, tapping his driver on the shoulder.

  “Jog left,” he said quickly. “I want to get off this damn road and into that town. The platoon will follow me.”

  The growl of the Lion’s engine was reassuring as they pivoted off the muddy road and found better traction when they approached the town, where the locals had laid down a lot of gravel in places to strengthen the road beds. Knispel had seen the grey stones gleaming wet in the morning light, and knew that was where he wanted to be—anywhere but on that muddy road where his heavy tank would labor to move even a few feet.

  “We were like a herd of elephants back there,” said Knispel, “snout to tail on that road, and just as slow. Now we’ve better ground under us. Head for that alleyway there.” He had his head out the open top hatch of his Lion, scanning the buildings on either side as they lumbered into the town. The four other Lions in his Pride followed him, grinding on in his wake. It was then that he heard the sharp crack of gunfire, and knew the enemy had finally arrived.

  “That was one of our 75’s,” he said, knowing the sound of the new German gun easily enough. Three muffled reports followed, and Knispel listened, hearing two more after that. Five enemy tanks had answered that fire, and he nodded to his gun loader, Willi Brom. “A full battalion,” he said calmly. “Good hunting today boys! Get to the northern edge of this town. That will give us the best angle on the main road.”

  Those few minutes of listening had told Knispel where the enemy was, east of the road, and approaching from beyond the high ground designated Hill 896 on his map. There, another small town called Slobodka lay at the base of the hill on its western slopes, and he had no doubt that the Russians would want that high ground if they had any infantry support. A secondary road emerged from the eastern fringe of the woods to the north, then ran along the flank of the hill between the two towns. The enemy would use that road, he knew, and now he was maneuvering to get into the best possible location to cover that approach.

  The rest of the battalion had turned right off the main road, heading for Slobodka, and that was where the action had started when the Russians began to mount a T-34 rush with Borisov’s battalion.

  Knispel squinted into the dawn, smelling rain on the wind, and deciding he would use Malakhovo as an armored castle to try and break the enemy charge. For the main road led north into that woodland, and he had little doubt that the enemy would have a column there, possibly setting up in those woods to stop the German advance. Then he saw tanks ahead, moving like grey shadows from the edge of the woods. He descended into the dark interior of the heavy turret, shutting the hatch above with a hard clank.

  “That house on the right,” said Knispel. “Take us right through the wall.”

  The driver gunned the engine, and the Lion surged forward, smashing easily through the stucco and light brick wall, and clean through the great room to open a hole in the opposite wall.

  “All stop,” said Knispel, watching through his periscope, and then opening the upper hatch one more time to peer outside. He was back with a grin a moment later.

  “They won’t see us here for a good long while. I’ll traverse left ten degrees,” he said calmly. “Load A.P.”

  “Now? They have to be three kilometers away Sergeant.”

  “Willi, the fight is on! Don’t make me give an order twice!”

  “Sorry Sergeant. Loading A.P. …. Gun Ready!”

  Knispel looked long and hard through the range finder, adjusting his optics slightly, and then fired. The round was hot from the gun, a streak of molten lava as it lanced out at the distant shadows. There came an explosion, and then Knispel saw the enemy tank he had been gunning for burning,

  “A kill!” he said. “Traversing right—five degrees…. Willi?”

  “Gun ready!”

  Another round pulsed towards a distant enemy tank, at least two kilometers off, for Knispel would become famous for these long shots, his keen eye for depth and range excelling in such situations to make him the lethal killer he was. Later in the war he would get a T-34 at just over three kilometers, a shot for the record books, which he was even now inscribing with his name. None of the other tanks in his platoon had fired, as their gun crews had not thought they could hit or hurt the enemy at such range. But Knispel heard Hellmann in his headset, shouting out congratulations. “Two kills, Sergeant Knispel. Keep up that good shooting!”

  The Sergeant was only too happy to comply.

  The kills were as much a shock to the enemy as they were to the other crews who saw them. The T-34s halted briefly, as if they were trying to sight and find the enemy that had attacked them, and then they began to put on speed, a rush of eighteen to twenty tanks heading for the edge of Malakhovo.

  “Fools rush in,” said Knispel as he watch the scene through his range finder. “Traversing right…” Another shot, another kill, the third in the space of five minutes. The T-34s began firing furiously as they charged, and Knispel took out one more tank before he barked out an order to maneuver.

  “Reverse engine… Back five meters!” The Lion had plowed right through the wall of an old farm house, and Knispel had been firing from inside the building, through a gaping hole in the far wall where the tank had smashed through as it came to a halt. As they pulled back, the Lion was now completely invisible to the on rushing enemy tanks, its hull and turret littered with broken chunks of mud brick and shattered boards.

  “Platoon!” shouted Knispel over his radio. “Open fire!”

  The sharp crack of the 75s split the air, and dark
smoke singed by red-yellow fire belched from the muzzles of the tanks. Knispel’s long shots had brought the wrath of the whole enemy battalion down on that corner of the village, and the buildings all around them suddenly erupted with hits from the enemy fire. It was Antonov’s battalion, coming down the main road through the woodland, just west of Borisov’s advance on the high ground near Slobodka. Yet they had no idea what they were now closing on, a line of five Lion’s at the edge of the village, four visible, one hidden in the rubble of the broken farm house.

  The Sergeant had been silently counting, after watching the enemy close as he ticked off the seconds. He adjusted the barrel of his Lion downward a few degrees, as if he already knew where the Russian tanks would be when he re-engaged.

  “Driver, forward again, five meters!”

  The growl of the big engine rumbled as the treads ground over the shattered plaster and brick. The long barrel of the main gun emerged from the yawning hole in the far wall, and Knispel was ready with his order to fire. Again the gun blasted away, and this time it was a glancing blow on the target, the round striking the frontal armor of the T-34 at an odd angle and scudding off in a wild ricochet.

  “Willie, one more time. I was too hasty.”

  Brom was working hard, his breath fast with the exertion and adrenaline of the moment. “Gun ready sir!”

  Another round was chambered and Knispel did not miss this second shot, a turret hit that devastated the enemy T-34. Colonel Antonov had lost twelve tanks in his mad rush, five of them to Knispel’s credit alone. The other eager young Corporals, Sergeants and Lieutenants in the brigade, now only just beginning their careers in the panzer force, would all get their turn in the hours ahead. Some had names that would be carved in steel over the next three violent years of war. At that very moment, Michael Whittmann was riding in the number three tank in II Battalion. With him was Balthazar Woll, his gunner, a man who would go on to kill over 100 tanks in the shadow of Whittmann’s 138 kills.

  Karl Mobius, another centurion who would log over 100 kills, was also in the brigade, along with Helmut Wendorff, who was credited with 95 in Fedorov’s history books. One platoon harbored Bobby Warmbrunn, Jurgen Brandt, and Heinz Kling, all fifty plus killers who would earn silver medals to go along with the gold that would be racked up by Knispel and others.

  Their sudden arrival on the scene had completely unhinged the Russian attack. Before it was over, the ABC Brigade would lose another fifteen T-34s, five KV-1s and a pair of T-60s. Not a single Lion was killed, though many took hits. Their frontal armor presented an impenetrable wall of steel, with stopping power equivalent to 120mm of armor, almost twice what the best Soviet guns in front of them could penetrate at the ranges fought.

  Now it was the Russians who would suffer tank shock. The advantage that had allowed them to bloody the nose of 4th Panzer Division at Mtsensk, picking off Panzer IIIs with their better 76mm guns, was suddenly over. The tables were turned again, and it was the German Lion which stood invincible on the field, capable of facing, and beating, any tank the Soviets had. The Russians fell back, retreating north to try and reorganize everything they had left.

  Chapter 17

  At Malakhovo, what remained of the ABC Brigade had swept up to the village like a wave on the shore, losing its strength and power on sharp, jagged rocks. One of Knispel’s platoon tanks had taken several hits, one damaging a track that left the tank temporarily immobile. Knispel heard the Sergeant call for support on the radio, and in a heartbeat, he ordered his driver to back out of the shattered shell of the old farmhouse and into the graveled alley. The Lion turned, the heavy tracks and 55 ton weight grinding on the gravel as the tanks moved on. When he reached the edge of the village they felt a hard chink on the forward side armor, and Knispel knew they had finally taken a hit. The wounded Lion was just ahead, and the Sergeant could see that three T-34’s had been jogging west to try and get around for a side shot. To make matters worse, he saw that white coated infantry were riding on their backs, and knew those men would soon leap from the tanks to begin a supporting attack.

  “Get us right behind Kleber’s tank!” he shouted, and the engine gunned as they moved forward, arriving just in time. The three T-34’s were starting to range on the wounded Lion, a round zipping past with an evil woosh.

  “See what I mean!” Knispel laughed. “They can’t fire on the move worth shit. Left five degrees. We’ll get the tank on that side first.”

  And he did.

  The wounded Lion also traversed to fire, and when the second tank had its turret blown completely off, the Germans cheered and whistled. Both Knispel and Kleber had hit it at nearly the same time.

  “There’s your lucky number seven!” said Willie, but the Sergeant shook his head.

  “That’s Kleber’s kill. I’ve got plenty of my own.”

  The third T-34 was backing away as fast as the driver could go, and Knispel had an easy shot, but he waited, seeing Kleber’s main gun traversing to engage. The Russians were firing, but missed again badly, their fire control on the move being abysmal, just as Knispel had predicted.

  “Take it out, Helmut!” said Knispel over his radio, and Helmut Kleber did exactly that, getting his second kill of the day, both tanks that Knispel could have easily destroyed himself. The enemy armor defeated, he ordered his driver forward to engage the infantry, emerging from the turret hatch to get on the main machine gun. The coaxial was already spitting fire at the Russian soldiers, who were running fitfully for the edge of the town. Knispel joined in, gunning them down, the shell casings ejecting and clattering over the heavy armored turret.

  Malakhovo was secure, at least at that moment, and Antonov’s battalion had been shattered. Knispel heard commands being shouted over his headset, and looked over his shoulder to see German infantry coming up through the rubble of the alleyway. The brigade had a full battalion of Panzergrenadiers in its structure, and each of the three tank battalions operated with a company of infantry mounted in APCs.

  The sounds of battle rumbled to the east, where 1st company had been engaged near Slobodka. Now the second battalion tanks were finally plowing through the mud on the main road south of the town, and beginning to enter Malakhovo. The initial enemy attack had been broken, and they would now take the lead and push on up the road while 1st Battalion reorganized.

  Knispel saw the lead tanks and knew it was Whittmann, an enterprising young Sergeant who had been plucked from an SS Regiment after getting six kills single handedly with a StuG III assault gun during a hot action earlier in Barbarossa. When the 101st Heavy Panzer Brigade was formed, it saw men from both the regular army and SS collected to receive the honor of driving Germany’s newest tanks. Every man there had to have at least five kills, and Whittmann’s tally just made the grade. It was the same score Knispel had brought with him, though he had just doubled his tally to twelve kills in this single engagement.

  Whittmann would learn much from the burly Lion headed Sergeant during his time with the 101st, and walk in his shadow, eventually reaching a total of 50 kills for his silver engagement medal two years from that moment, when Knispel was closing in on a hundred himself. Then, in the desperate fighting of 1944, Michael Whittmann would suddenly earn his reputation as “The Black Baron,” and rack up another fifty kills within a three week period. Now, however, he was still learning his trade, and Knispel gave him thumbs up as his tank lumbered by.

  “Don’t be greedy,” he heard Whittmann shout his way. “Leave a few for the rest of us!”

  “Plenty more out there,” Knispel shouted back. “They’ll be in that tree line ahead.” He saw Whittmann clench his fist, eager to get after them.

  The tanks of the second battalion rumbled by, and Knispel was out through his hatch and down off the Lion to help the crew of Kleber’s wounded tank fix that damaged track. He wanted to get on up that road as much as anyone else, but he would not leave any tank in his platoon behind. As he labored, his hands muddied and raw from the gravel in the alle
y way, another man waited in the relative silence of the woodland, just where Kurt Knispel said he would be.

  Dmitri Lavrinenko was eager for a kill that day as well, and he would not have to wait long.

  *

  6th Tank Brigade was on the Russian left, still unaware of the sharp reversal that had been suffered by the ABC Brigade in their mad rush on Malakhovo. The three battalion commanders here, Kamenko, Sorokin and Telenin, would make a strong push to try and cut the main road from the east. To do so they would face off against old Rubber Nose again, KG Eberbach of Langermann’s 4th Panzer Division. The T-34s sloshed through the gravel bed of a small stream, growing ever more swollen with the rain, and the tanks gleamed with wet moonlight as the 6th Brigade pushed on ahead. They ran right into Eberbach’s II/35 Panzer Battalion. Startled by the sudden appearance of so many enemy tanks, the German battalion chose prudence over bravado, and quickly fell back half a kilometer to reach the supporting infantry of KG Dorn’s Panzergrenadier Battalion. There they reorganized a combined arms Kampfgruppe, and launched an immediate counterattack just before dawn.

  Even as they did so, thunder rolled, and the skies opened with torrential rain. The Russians had seen the German withdrawal, and came on, heedless of the danger, and for a moment it looked like the weight of three full tank battalions was going to be more than Eberbach could handle. His Kampfgruppe was still mostly comprised of Panzer IIIs, and the 50mm guns were getting hits that often bounced harmlessly off the frontal armor of the T-34s.

  The 1941 model of the Russian T-34 had what was thought to be very solid 81mm frontal armor. The German Panzer IIIs, even with their improved 5cm KwK 39 main gun, could only penetrate 44mm of frontal armor at 1000 meter range. At point blank range of 100 meters, it could only penetrate 67mm of armor, and so the T-34 had been largely invulnerable unless caught from the side or rear with a very good shot. But all that was over, almost before it had started.