The Devil's Shield (Dogs of War)

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Stop them, von Dodenburg,’ he cried, alarmed by the naked hate in the women’s faces. ‘Order your men to fire!’

  ‘But General, they are women and they are German,’ he protested. Then it was too late.

  Their eyes shining crazily, cursing and spitting, they fell on the handful of troops. The street became a confused mess of twisting, snarling men and women, clawing and grabbing at each other. Krause dodged the low kick launched at his crotch by a field mattress and grabbed at her grey blouse. It ripped. The screaming snarling woman’s great bare breasts, released from the official-issue bra, fell out.

  Krause’s grin vanished. ‘What tits!’ he breathed in awe, just as another woman sprang on his back and clutching her skinny arm round his neck began to strangle him, shouting at the top of her voice.

  An elderly woman tried to hit Schwarz with her umbrella. He ducked and a blow landed on his helmet with a hollow boom. The next instant he had punched her in her fat belly with his wooden hand. She gasped and went down like a deflated balloon.

  A pretty girl with long bright red hair ripped her nails across von Dodenburg’s face. He winced with pain. ‘You sow!’ he grunted and attempted to grab her hand, the blood dripping down her fingers. He missed. She swung at him again. He ducked and flung his arms round her. Suddenly he felt her body, warm and nubile, pressed close to him and sensed the heady scent of her flaming hair just under his nose.

  ‘Let go, you SS swine,’ she screamed, wriggling desperately to break his hold, her green eyes looking up at him, burning with rage, her soft stomach pressed provocatively into his loins as she tried to do so.

  He felt his excitement grow. Suddenly she realised that the handsome blond colonel in the black uniform was aroused. Her struggling ceased. She tried to withdraw her body from the importuning loins. But he wouldn’t let her.

  ‘Come on, you bitch, don’t let go now,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘You swine – you absolute swine,’ she whispered, looking up at him, the anger suddenly gone out of the green eyes, ‘Have you no shame?’

  But his answer was drowned by the shot from Donner’s pistol and the scream of the woman in the black widow’s weeds, who slowly began to sink to the ground, her black-stockinged legs buckling under her.

  ‘Heaven, arse and twine,’ Schulze breathed as he looked around the great underground room, piled high with supplies, with the drunken whores sprawled out on the cushions listening to the ancient horn gramophone, ‘it’s like ladies’ night in a Turkish bath.’ He gulped and, pushing back his helmet, took in the seven or eight whores, dressed in gaudy underwear, champagne glasses in hand, listening to Johannes Heesters singing ‘Gern’ hab’ ich die Frauen gekuesst!’

  ‘Oh, my holy Christ,’ Matz standing next to him said. ‘Have you ever seen so much meat and so few potatoes in all your life, Sergeant-Major? I’d like to fill their teeth – one by one – and slowly.’

  Suddenly the girls became aware of their presence. A big blonde whore in transparent black underwear tripped drunkenly towards Schulze, arms outstretched.

  ‘Men,’ she breathed, her eyes half closed, ‘real men – with tails.’

  Gently Schulze avoided her grasp. ‘Later, darling, later.’ He turned to the fat squat SA man. ‘You mean you’ve been living with this lot?’ he asked incredulously. ‘No wonder you’ve got such round shoulders.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ the SA man answered, trying to stem the flow of blood from his broken nose. ‘I had to take a lot of rest.’

  ‘The pig,’ the blonde whore sniffed. ‘At it all day like a fiddler’s elbow. Nothing in his head, but plenty between the legs, that one.’

  ‘I should have such troubles,’ Matz breathed, putting his arm around a dark-haired whore in a frilly negligee and sheer black silk stockings. ‘I’d have died a happy man.’

  ‘Hold yer water,’ Schulze snapped. ‘Can’t you see that I’m shitting well thinking?’

  ‘Oh, I thought you were suffering from wind, Sergeant-Major,’ Matz answered, giving the dark-haired whore’s mighty right breast a powerful squeeze.

  Schulze ignored him. ‘All right, you golden pheasant,’ he answered, ‘I’m not going to turn you and your little bees in. You can stay here.’

  The SA man’s face lit up despite his pain, while the excited half-naked girls crowded around the soldiers, giggling and laughing. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Schulze said brutally. ‘There are conditions. You’ve got to keep your hairy paws off them. From now onwards, your little bees belong to us and to us exclusively. Get it?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he agreed.

  ‘You’ve got plenty of chow and booze here. And when you run out, we’ll supply you with more. All we want is that when we’re off duty, your bees’ pearly gates are open, ready and waiting.’

  ‘Don’t worry, soldier,’ the big blonde said, lighting a thin black cigar, ‘we’re all ready for a little bit of fresh meat, aren’t we girls?’

  ‘Yes,’ they chorused enthusiastically. ‘We have had enough of that pig. If you only knew what the fat bastard made us do these last few days.’

  Matz laughed throatily and began fumbling with his flies. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet, ladies.’

  Schulze gave him a rough push. ‘Knock that off! There’s no time for that now. You’ll have to wait till tonight when the colonel stands us down.’

  ‘Not even a quickie, Sergeant-Major? I won’t even bother to take my wooden leg off.’

  ‘I’ll take off yer stupid head, if you don’t shut up,’ Schulze threatened. ‘We’re supposed to be on patrol. You can’t go screwing around when you’re on duty. All right, all of you outside – on the shitting double. And you, my little fat golden pheasant,’ he brought his big face close to that of the SA man’s threateningly, ‘I’m making you responsible for seeing that your bees are ready for us tonight!’ Gallantly Schulze raised his helmet. ‘Then, ladies, I must bid you adieu till later.’ He beamed at them. ‘I trust you will have a pleasant day, and can stand the long wait till your prince returns.’

  The whores giggled uproariously. At the door to the cellar he turned and gave them one long hand-kiss as did Johannes Heesters in the movies.

  ‘Till tonight, my fair ones.’

  But Sergeant-Major Schulze and his ‘hunting commando’ were doomed to disappointment. They had hardly recommenced their patrol when Colonel von Dodenburg’s VW jeep came bouncing up and down the pitted road, its horn sounding an urgent signal. The colonel pulled up with a squeal of brakes.

  Schulze looked at the CO in surprise. He was helmetless, his face flushed and scratched, and a red-haired beauty was slumped sulkily in the back seat, her pale oval face stained with drying tears. But von Dodenburg did not give him time to dwell on the situation.

  ‘Matz, you take over the platoon and get back to HQ at the double. You Schulze, get in the front next to me. I need you urgently.’

  ‘What’s up, sir?’

  Colonel von Dodenburg rammed home first gear while Matz rapped out his orders to the platoon. ‘Everything’s up. We’ve just put down a shitty riot – women and a priest. And now the balloon’s really gone up.’

  As the jeep shot forward, throwing Schulze violently against the hard seat and nearly tossing the redhead from her perch, von Dodenburg snapped through gritted teeth, ‘The damn Amis have broken through in force in the Aachen State Forest. We’re in trouble, real trouble, Schulze!’

  FIVE

  The little red lamp inside the lumbering Royal Tiger blinked on and off evilly. It signified that the tank’s 88 mm and twin mgs were ready for action. Schulze, squatting in the gunner’s seat next to von Dodenburg, did not need the warning light, however, to tell him that they were heading for trouble. He felt it in his bones.

  Now they had left the ruined suburbs and were advancing in an attack V across rough undulating country. The landscape ahead had that tense, empty look that always signified a co
ming battlefield. It was as though the very earth itself were dreading the slaughter to come.

  ‘Driver straight along the embankment,’ von Dodenburg intoned. ‘Schulze – six hundred. Traverse left.’ With the easy efficiency of years of practice, Schulze swung the fourteen-ton turret round and set the range at the same time. They were getting close to the thick pine wood in which the Amis had dug in. Soon the trouble would start and he might get his stupid turnip blown off without even having had a chance to sample the delights of his private brothel.

  ‘Shitting war,’ he grumbled to himself and pressed his eye to the rubber-shod eye-piece. ‘Can’t even get a piece of tail in peace?’

  ‘Did you say something, Schulze?’ von Dodenburg queried, busy with his twin periscopes.

  ‘Yessir,’ Schulze snapped. ‘I said – I’m going to rip ’em to pieces today. I feel just in the right mood.’

  ‘Hm,’ his CO answered. I’ll believe you, but thousands wouldn’t.’

  The tanks rumbled on across the open fields. The woods came closer and closer. Five hundred metres, four hundred. Three hundred and fifty.

  ‘Stand by, Schulze,’ von Dodenburg ordered. ‘Driver reduce speed now.’

  With a deafening roar the driver crashed through half a dozen of the sixty-ton monster’s thirty-odd gears to bring down the Tiger’s speed. At the same time, Schulze pressed his shoulder against the 88’s leatherbound grip so that he could move the great hooded gun with the slightest movement. His hand gripped the trigger handle tightly. Now the crosswires inside the glass circle of the sight were aligned perfectly with the wood. A few seconds more and the CO would give the order to fire; he would send the first HE1 shell screaming into the wood. The rest of the Wotan would follow suit and then they would sit back to wait for the panic-stricken Ami stubble-hoppers to come running out to be massacred by the waiting machine-gunners. It was a simple plan – a risky one if faced by well-dug-in, trained infantry armed with bazookas. But von Dodenburg, like most SS officers, was contemptuous of the Ami’s fighting ability. He was prepared to take chances he would never have taken with the Tommies and Ivans.

  Von Dodenburg’s attack did not develop as he had anticipated. Suddenly an open truck, filled with troops, came flashing from behind the wood, travelling across the field at high speed, its occupants bouncing up and down like toy soldiers.

  ‘Amis!’ the driver gasped. ‘Amis at twelve o’clock, sir.’

  ‘I’m not blind,’ von Dodenburg commented coldly.

  Even before he could rap out the order, Schulze had swung the 88 round.

  ‘FIRE!’

  There was stomach-jerking spasm of the recoil. The turret flooded with acrid yellow smoke. The gleaming shell-case clattered smoking to the metal deck, as the shell itself screamed towards its target. It struck the Ami deuce-and-half2 just above the engine. With a roar it exploded, ripping apart metal, canvas, human flesh.

  As the force of the shock wave struck him in the face, von Dodenburg grabbed the turrret mg. The force of the explosion had thrown some of the Amis from the shattered, now burning truck. Frantically the survivors were trying to pelt for the wood. Von Dodenburg pressed the trigger. 7-mm slugs tore through the the air at 800 rounds a minute. A man caught in mid-stride seemed suspended there like a statue of a runner. Then he flopped down, his body hiccupping convulsively. Another fell, throwing up his arms with wild pain so that his grease-gun rose high into the air. Others were felled, as if their legs had been sawn off at the knees.

  Von Dodenburg lowered the gun. With a last burst he swept the grass so that even those feigning death would not escape. In thirty seconds it was all over and they were rattling past the smashed truck leaning on its side on burst tyres, the flames licking up about its cargo of dead Amis. Their great tracks churned over the bodies and were turned red with their blood.

  ‘Ami tanks!’ the driver yelled frantically.

  As the first Sherman burst out of the bushes, trying desperately to protect the threatened infantry of the ‘Big Red One’,3 Schulze pulled the firing lever. The Royal Tiger shuddered. They hit the Sherman just below the turret at point-blank range. The tank was flung high into the air. It descended with a bomblike whine and buried its gun deep into the soft earth.

  ‘Two o’clock – Ami!’ von Dodenburg screamed, automatically pressing the fume-extractor to clear the acrid yellow smoke now blinding them.

  A Sherman armed with the new British seventeen-pounder gun was trying to approach them from the flank, knowing that the Tiger’s half-metre-thick glacis plate4 was virtually impregnable. But from the side the seventeen-pounder might be able to penetrate the base of the turret-ring or knock off a boogie wheel and cripple the massive German tank.

  Using all his strength, Schulze flung the gun round. The Sherman slid into the glass circle of his lenses. The cross-wires sliced it in half. He snatched at the lever. The gun erupted. For a fleeting instant his vision was obscured by the yellow-red burst of the shell. Then the Sherman rocked from side to side, as if in a high wind. Oily black smoke and red sparks welled from its open turret. The tank commander was fighting his way out of the hatch but the flames were already licking at his body. He slumped over the turret. The flames leapt up, eating his uniform. They caught his hair, sprang to the face and the slow-moving, ever-weakening hands that tried in vain to beat them out. Before Schulze’s eyes, the tank commander’s face began to turn into a charred grinning death’s head.

  But there was no time for such horrors. An American self-propelled gun was lumbering out of the forest, followed by another – and another. And the Ami SPs were armed with a 105 mm which was a match even for the 88. This time the Amis scored first. A 105 mm roared with a tremendous fury. One of the Tigers on the right flank shuddered to a halt, a broken track flapping in front of it like a severed limb. The Ami SPs saw their advantage. In an instant they had turned their massive guns on the stricken German tank. Red and white balls of flame, AP shells, hurtled through the grey sky towards the Tiger. Time and again it heeled back and forth struck by each new shell. Its crew began to panic.

  ‘Stay there! For Christ sake, stay there!’ von Dodenburg yelled desperately over the radio.

  But even the veterans of Wotan could not stand up to such cruel, concentrated fire. They bailed out from the turret and escape hatches and began to pelt madly for cover. From the cover of the woods came a vicious burst of US BAR-fire. One after another, the black-clad tankers flung up their arms in wild abandon and fell to the ground as the hot lead buried into their defenceless flesh.

  ‘Lights!’ von Dodenburg commanded urgently. ‘Driver, flick off your lights quickly — and on again!’

  The expected reaction came. The M-4os swung round their long cannon and started to concentrate their fire on the command tank. For some reason which von Dodenburg had still not been able to work out, the sight of the lights always angered or attracted enemy tank fire. A shell scored its way along the outside of the tank turret. Fascinated, he watched as the impact traced a white-hot line around the inside of the turret. It would only take one fragment to penetrate the armour somewhere or other and they would all be dead or maimed within seconds; for the fragment would fly from side to side until it found a victim inside the tight confines of the turret.

  ‘Concentrate at nine!’ he cried through the mike as his own gun erupted again. Swiftly he flung a look through the periscope at his nearest neighbour, Matz’s tank.

  Matz was way out. ‘Nine, I said, you whoreson,’ he yelled. ‘Not eleven! Turn seven minus thirty-six. Fire!’

  A moment later Matz’s gun joined in. Together he and Matz tried to pin the Amis down, backing them against the wood with their concentrated fire so that they would not be able to man-oeuvre. But they hadn’t reckoned with the commander of the first enemy SP. The tank was lumbering towards them at top speed. Desperately Schulze spun the turret round. The triangles met in the sighting mechanism. He fired too late, The great shell missed the Ami by a dozen metres. The SP�
�s bulk blacked out the whole lenses. It seemed as if the Tiger were about to capsize. It rocked on its base. Screams rang out from the driver’s compartment, drowned by the grinding crash of metal meeting metal at speed.

  Von Dodenburg was flung against the breech of the cannon. Fortunately he still had his helmet on. But his vision was obscured by violent, moving red lights. Schulze clung grimly to the leather grip, the blood pouring from his nostrils with the impact, and waited for the rocking motion to cease. Frantically he ripped off his earphones. Thrusting back the hatch cover, he raised his head into the air.

  The crew of the M-40 was sprawled out in the SP’s open deck like a bunch of drunks, paralysed momentarily by the shock of the impact. In a few moments, they would come out of it and begin to react. But Schulze did not give them time to do so. He grabbed a phosphorous grenade attached to the inside of the turret. He pulled the china-ring pin and lobbed it neatly into the centre of the sprawled-out men. It exploded at once, shooting fiery pellets of burning phosporus everywhere, burning whitely as they descended on to their human victims. He followed it by a normal potato masher. The scorching, screaming bodies rose and fell heavily onto the deck. Hastily he dropped back into his seat and pulled shut the hatch cover. The driver rumbled forward again.

  The Ami SPs did not have a chance. Fifteen Tigers and Royal Tigers concentrated their fire upon them, as they backed into the wood, trying to scuttle for cover and finding that even their weight and power could not force a path through the thick pines. The Tigers rolled forward, intent on the kill, churning earth and mud. Shell after shell ripped through the burning, trembling air. One by one the crippled M-40s, rocked from side to side by the German fire, abandoned the fight, their crews bolting for the woods and finding that the enemy gunners were waiting for them to do exactly that. A last Sherman appeared and tried to give the fleeing crews some sort of cover. The Ami tank did not get too far. A blood-lust had overcome the sweating, smoke-blackened gunners. A direct hit knocked off the tank’s turret and flung it high into the air. The gunners could see right into its guts where the lower part of the commander’s body was still squatting in his seat. The gunner was crouched beside him over his gun-sight. But his gun and his hands were gone, and the blood dripped from his shattered wrists.