Claws of Steel

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Smoke!’ von Dodenburg yelled urgently. Tor Chrissake – smoke everybody!’

  The gunners needed no urging. The first Soviet line was still two hundred metres, away and they were completely exposed now. Quickly they fired their smoke dischargers. The black containers soared clumsily into the air. They exploded almost immediately, throwing a thick white stream of smoke ahead of the ragged line of tanks. In a matter of seconds the Wotan was wreathed in a dense mist.

  Frustrated of their prey, the Soviet gunners intensified their fire, knowing they must stop the Tigers before they got into the first line. The air filled with the hysterical screams of the Stalin Organs. From the rear the heavies crumped throatily, over and over again. And as the distance between the attackers and defenders narrowed, the Russians began to take a toll of the Tigers. Suddenly the radio began reporting their casualties on all sides.

  ‘Two m.g.s bothering me from left flank – all my Panzer Grenadiers hit. Like a skating rink with blood up on the deck …’ … ‘Track gone, I’m sitting out here like a spare penis at a wedding. Need protection urgently …’ ‘Engine damaged. Can’t see a hand in front of you for fumes. Can I bail out? …’

  Then suddenly they had burst through their own smoke screen and with the Soviet barrage still hitting the ground behind them harmlessly, they were only one hundred metres from the enemy line.

  The ground was pitted everywhere with huge brown holes. The few trees there were, were stripped white of their bark, their boughs hanging down like shattered limbs. But there were still Soviet troops alive and willing to fight among the shattered wreckage of the front line. Almost immediately the signal flares hushed into the burning air everywhere. The Soviet machine guns opened up angrily. Lead pattered against the Tigers’ metal sides like heavy summer rain. But there was no stopping them now.

  The 1st Company’s flame-thrower tank darted out its deadly tongue. Flame licked its way around the first bunker. The paint on its wall bubbled suddenly like heated toffee. Its machine gun stopped firing. Two T-34s came rumbling frantically towards them. In their haste and fear they crashed into each other. The next instant a luck shot from the flank whacked into them and went through both. Nobody bailed out.

  ‘Spread out – First Company, for God’s sake spread out!’ von Dodenburg yelled desperately over the radio.

  Not a moment too soon. A Soviet 57 mm, concealed behind what looked like a barn, opened up at seventy-five metres range. Von Dodenburg could actually see the glowing white AP3 shell heading towards them, gaining speed every second.

  ‘Gunner – target two—’

  The crump of the tank’s 88 crashed into his words. The gunner had seen the anti-tank gun before he had. The 57 mm disappeared in a ball of ugly red and yellow flame, its crew dark pieces of flotsam flying through the air. Below them, Schulze wrenched at the steering rods. The Tiger swung round violently, sending a surprised von Dodenburg careening against the hull. His mouth filled with salt-tasting blood. But he had no time for his cut face. The Soviet shell had missed them. But another T-34 was roaring in out of the smoke, only a matter of fifty metres away.

  ‘Gunner,’ he cried in an agony of urgent fear. ‘Three o’clock – Popov tank!’

  Schulze, reading von Dodenburg’s mind, crashed home the reverse gear. The Tiger thundered out of the way, cutting into a group of Soviet infantrymen carrying a rocket-launcher. They disappeared under the tank’s great metal tracks screaming, to be flung out at the other side like pieces of chopped beef. The Tiger crew did not even notice. The T-34’s shell whistled past their turret. The 60-ton monster rocked as if it had been made of paper and not steel. The next instant the T-34 shot over the top of the burning bunker, revealing the whole length of its underarmoured belly.

  ‘Gunner – for Chrissake, get him in the knackers!’ Schulze yelled from below.

  ‘Now – now,’ von Dodenburg urged, ready to feed in the next shell. The gunner pressed the pedal. The turret swung round. In the sight, the twin triangles met. The belly of the T-34 blocked out everything else. It seemed to fill the whole world. Peering through his own periscope, von Dodenburg could see every rusty rivet, every mud and oil-stained bolt.

  The gunner pulled the firing lever. There was the grate of metal striking metal. Even through the thickness of their own turret armour, their ears rang with the enormous din. The T-34 rose into the air and fell the next instant on its back.

  Their Tigers pushed on. With Dodenburg in the lead, the 1st Company rolled over dead and dying Russians, crushing them deep into the very earth, which suddenly began to turn to dusty red with their blood. From the cunning camouflaged ‘readiness bunkers’ behind the pillboxes, Ivans in dark-coloured underwear came streaming out, screaming at the tops of their voices. They didn’t have a chance. Von Dodenburg’s twin spandaus burst into them at 800 rounds per minute. They fell like crazy nine-pins. Within seconds they were piled up six deep at the doors of the bunkers. As the first wave rolled by, some one tossed a couple of incendiary grenades into the nearest heap. The Ivans began to burn fiercely, with those still alive struggling vainly to get out of the funeral pyre.

  A small T-60 Soviet tank came careering round a corner. Four 88 mm shells hit it simultaneously. It disappeared, as if it had never even existed. Everywhere now the Ivans were throwing down their weapons and beginning to surrender. But the men of Wotan had no time for prisoners.

  ‘Come on over here, you bastards,’ von Dodenburg heard a voice cry over the radio – he couldn’t identify whose. ‘We’ll flatten you like floor mats!’

  Whoever it was, he made good his promise. A stream of machine gun poured into the Russians. They scattered panic-stricken. Too late. They went down in their dozens.

  They roared on. But von Dodenburg trying to bring some order into his hopelessly snarled up company knew they weren’t through the first line completely yet. Cursing viciously over the radio and repeatedly shouting at members of other companies who were getting into his frequency, he managed to extend his two flanks and prevent the centre group of Tigers from bunching too much. He succeeded just in time. Just as they had cleared the last of the bunkers, leaving behind them a bloody wake of crushed dead and dying Ivans, the smoke dissipated to reveal a fantastic spectacle.

  An arrowhead of some twenty T-34s advancing towards them, their headlights blazing, their tracks muffled by the thick dust so that they looked like noiseless spectres. Von Dodenburg pressed his throat mike swiftly.

  ‘Schulze, give me everything you’ve got!’

  Schulze responded at once. He shot the gear lever through the thirty-odd forward gears the Tiger had. The 60-ton monster gathered speed.

  ‘Traverse right,’ the young SS officer yelled urgently. ‘We’ve got to flank the right wing!’

  The sweat-soaked gunner, his uniform back a greasy black with perspiration, swung the long gun through an arc, while von Dodenburg tore another shell from the rack in front of him. He pressed the smoke extractor button again. The distance between the two lines of tanks was narrowing now. Behind him he knew that his own Tigers would be forming an arrow formation too, forced by his own manoeuvre to the right of the T-34s. Next to him, the gunner, his eye pressed to the rubber sight, began to call out the distance.

  ‘Three hundred metres … two hundred metres … one hundred and fifty.’

  But it was the Soviets who fired first. Suddenly there was a blinding light from the closest T-34. A second later the sound of the explosion erupted into the silence. Blast engulfed them, followed by a breathless suction.

  The gunner yelled out as if he had been hit while the Tiger rocked like a ship in a gale at sea as the 76 mm shell swept by them harmlessly. But it was just fear, not pain. In the next instant he pulled the firing lever and their own shell shot out towards the Soviets.

  What happened next was a confused mess of muzzle flashes, the scrunch of metal against metal, the shriek of ricochets, and the great whoosh of fuel tanks exploding and another tank dying in a great bl
ack funeral pyre of oily smoke. Twice they heard the rapping of death on their turret like the beak of some monstrous raven, as shells careened off it, leaving a faint glowing redness in the yellow darkness as the shell worked its way along the metal before glancing off harmlessly. But in each case their Soviet opponents paid for their temerity, their T-34s being brewed up immediately, spewing their metallic lava towards the burning sky.

  How long the tank battle lasted, von Dodenburg never knew. It might have been hours, but it also might only have been minutes. More than once he had been forced to open the turret, risking the danger of some Soviet suicide squad armed with Molotov cocktails, in order to clear the cupola of the yellow acrid fumes; and each time as he risked a glance about him all he could see was dying tanks – German and Russian – everywhere.

  And then suddenly the fight went out of what was left of the Russians. Von Dodenburg caught a glimpse of the Soviet regimental commander as he tried to rally his wavering force with his little signal flags. But a lucky Spandau burst ripped out his chest and as he slumped dead over the red star decorating his turret, his men panicked.

  The T-34 drivers spun their vehicles round in their tracks. A couple barely missed crashing into each other in their panic-stricken haste. Everywhere the Germans cheered – von Dodenburg could hear them over the crackling radio. Swiftly they started to plaster the retreating T-34s. Now they were easy meat, their under-armoured engines clearly exposed. But their radio link must have been still functioning. For just as the men of Wotan had begun ranging in, the Stalin organs to the rear opened up again and plastered the battlefield with smoke and high explosion.

  ‘Hastily von Dodenburg pressed his throat mike. ‘All right,’ he yelled, retire – retire!’

  ‘A German soldier never gives up ground,’ an unknown young voice cried angrily over the radio.

  ‘You’ll be telling me next you believe in the stork and Father Christmas, you silly young shit?’ It was Schulze, shouting into the intercom in his thick waterfront accent. ‘Get yer arse out of here before the Popovs cut off yer sodding, dumb eggs – with a blunt penknife!’

  Suiting his own actions to his words, he spun the sixty ton monster round and sent it clattering back the way it had come. Behind him the survivors of the 1st Company did the same. The first day of the great new offensive was over.

  Schwarz’s Second Company was shooting the few Ivan prisoners when the 1st Company rattled to a stop among the Soviet hedgehogs. It was all very scientific and routine. Occasionally one of the shaven-headed teenage Siberians whimpered and refused to move forward towards the liquidation squad, made up of Schwarz, his bare arms bloodied to the elbows, and a couple of his senior NCOs. A rifle butt between the shoulders or crashed against the back of his shaven skull soon persuaded the man to move forward. But mostly they accepted their fate impassively, no emotion showing on their flat yellow faces, as the liquidators placed their Walthers behind the Siberians’ right ears and blew them into a Soviet paradise.

  All the same von Dodenburg did not like the look of the pile of corpses stacked awkwardly by Schwarz’s command Tiger, their limbs thrust out extravagantly. He looked the other way as he marched up to a waiting Vulture, clicked his heels together and reported in the parade ground style the CO expected from his officers even in the middle of a battlefield.

  ‘Three vehicles completely knocked out, two suitable for recovery. Casualties – ten officers and men killed, fifteen wounded!’

  The Vulture touched his overlarge cap with his riding crop. ‘Good, von Dodenburg. Not bad at all.’ He took the yonger man and steered him away from where Schwarz was about to place his bloodied pistol against an impassive-faced Siberian’s skull yet once again. ‘Let’s get away from here. We’ve had enough noise for this day – and besides those damned Chinks are lousy anyway. I’d hate to get their lice on me.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  Obediently von Dodenburg walked along beside his CO automatically stepping over the Soviet dead sprawled out in the ruins or skirting a new shell crater, while the Vulture put him in the picture.

  ‘It’s been an excellent day. Obviously we caught the Popovs with their knickers down. Apparently they thought the main attack would come from the North – from Colonel-General Model. According to that Sergeant who controls our destiny – Kraemer was on the radio-phone to me a quarter of an hour ago. We’ve penetrated the 52nd Guards Rifle Brigade or Division, we don’t know which yet. You know how slow Gehlen’s Intelligence is.’4

  Von Dodenburg didn’t, but he nodded his agreement, as if he did. He stepped over a Popov whose face had been burned completely away, leaving a black congealed mass, streaked with dried blood and two scarlet pools where his eyes had once been.

  ‘My guess is that we’ve split the Sixth Guards Army and that Prokhorovka will fall like a ripe apple tomorrow.’

  Despite his utter weariness, von Dodenburg’s face beamed beneath its oily mask. ‘That’s really good news,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘But what about Kempf’s detachments?’

  The Vulture stared at the burping plain, littered with crippled tanks now silhouetted stark black against the blood-red ball of the setting sun.

  ‘They’re not providing the flank coverage Dietrich anticipated they would. After all they do not belong to the elite of the Armed SS, do they?’

  Von Dodenburg dismissed the Vulture’s underlying cynicism. ‘Oh, let the damn flanks take care of themselves, sir. We’ve always done it before, why should we worry now.’ He forced a tired laugh. ‘The Wotan will move so fast that the Popovs won’t be able to find our flanks.’

  The Vulture grinned faintly at the younger man’s uninhibited enthusiasm. He raised his shoulders wearily. ‘I’m sure you’re right, von Dodenburg. Very well, see your men are bedded down soon. We shall move out at dawn, push through the village of Pokrovka and go hell-for-leather for Prokhorovka—’

  He broke off suddenly. To their front a small group of men from the tank recovery section were using a foot pump to clean out the inside of a shot-up Tiger. Up to now a stream of pink liquid had been spurting out of the drainage holes – blood mixed with water. But for some reason there was a blockage and pump as they would, no further liquid came out. Casually Vulture, followed by an utterly weary von Dodenburg, went over to the recovery crew.

  ‘What’s the matter, corporal?’ the CO asked the sweating corporal at the pump.

  ‘The sod won’t flush, sir,’ he gasped and stopped his efforts. In spite of the blessed coolness of the evening, the sweat was still pouring from his naked chest.

  ‘You’ve got a blockage then, haven’t you. Why don’t you go inside and find it?’

  ‘Well, sir.’ Suddenly the skinny bare-chested corporal was embarrassed.

  ‘She took a direct hit with a 76 mm.’ He indicated the gleaming metallic hole neatly skewered through the Tiger’s turrel. ‘The crew was all dead when we got the pieces out and we sort of—’

  ‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’ the Vulture broke into his lame explanation. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

  Impatiently the Vulture pushed him to one side and swung himself on the blackened turret. ‘I want this vehicle back in action by dawn,’ he said looking down at the crew. ‘I’ve got no time for your petty fears.’

  And with that he clambered inside the cupola. For a few minutes they could hear him rummaging around in the dark charred chaos inside. Suddenly the blood-and-water mixture started to run again from the drainage holes.

  The Vulture reappeared at the turret, his enormous nose wrinkled up, obviously disgusted by the stench of the tank’s interior. He held up one hand. Hanging from it by the hair was a head. With a sudden hot spasm of nausea, von Dodenburg recognised it. It was that of Corporal Dehn of his own Company.

  ‘This was the thing blocking the main hole,’ the Vulture said in completely normal tone. Almost casually he tossed the head aside. The recovery crew ducked hastily as the gruesome thing sailed by them. The Vulture stepped down, dust
ing his bloodied hands on his breeches. ‘Now get on with it. We’ve got exactly seven more hours till dawn.’

  The recovery crew began pumping again as if their very lives depended on it, while behind them in the dust the sightless eyes of Corporal Dehn’s skull stared into a darkening sky.

  Thirty odd kilometres from where the recovery crew hosed out the damaged Tiger that night, the squat, bald representative of the Soviet Military Council faced Lieutenant General Katukov and his staff in their underground bunker. The Commander of the Soviet First Tank Army had just ordered that two regiments of his assault guns drawn from his reserves of 1,300 armoured vehicles, should go to the aid of the badly hit Sixth Guards Army. Now he wondered what the little civilian politico, disguised as a major general in the Red Army, would want from him next.

  But surprisingly enough the politico wanted nothing else. He let his cunning peasant eyes run round the grave pale faces of the assembled staff officers.

  ‘The next two or three days will be terrible, comrades,’ he said slowly, warningly. ‘Either we hold or the Germans will take Kursk. They are putting everything on one card.’ He raised his pudgy forefinger in a gesture that the whole world would come to know and fear one day. ‘It’s a matter of life or death for them. We must take care to see that they break their necks.’ Major General Nikita Khrushchev, one day to be dictator of all Russia, chuckled throatily, the jowls of his broad peasant face wobbling as he did so.

  Suddenly he raised his right knee and snapped his powerful hands across it. ‘Just like that, comrades,’ he growled, not taking his eyes from their faces. ‘That is how we will deal with the Fritzes. Understand?’

  Again he chuckled, but there was no humour in his light blue eyes. In spite of the warmth of the underground bunker the staff officers of the First Tank Army shivered and told themselves they would not like to be in the Fritzes’ shoes on the morrow.

  Notes

  1. Fortified positions, manned by a company of infantry with four or five pieces of artillery, linked together in a rough line (transl.)