Claws of Steel

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘I’m looking for the HQ of SS Assault Battalion Wotan.’

  ‘You mean Battle Group Wotan, sir,’ the broken-nosed para corrected him. ‘Oh, that’s across the square and down that side-street, past the Eyetie knocking shops – oh, excuse me, sir. I mean the Italian brothels, sir.’

  Von Dodenburg smiled a little wearily. ‘I know what a knocking shop is, Corporal. Thank you.’ He touched his hand to his cap again and keeping to the shade he went in the direction indicated by the para.

  ‘Shitty SS,’ the corporal muttered behind his back and made an obscene gesture with his middle finger. ‘Arrogant bastards – think the sun shines out of their arseholes!’

  Slowly, feeling the sweat trickling down the small of his back in the September heat, von Dodenburg made his way towards the Wotan’s new headquarters. The paras of Student’s Airborne Corps1 were digging in everywhere. Obviously, von Dodenburg told himself, they were expecting trouble. Even if the Amis didn’t drop paratroops on Rome, there was a damn good chance that the Italians would break out of the ‘Pact of Steel’ and start fighting their former allies. Whatever happened, he thought as he reached the blessed shade of the entrance to Wotan’s HQ and showed his pass to the SS sentry, Wotan would be in action soon even if the Amis were still crawling up Italy like a lazy bug on a boot.

  Metzger, dressed in summer uniform, clicked to attention when he saw von Dodenburg. ‘Major von Dodenburg, sir. Glad to see you again, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Metzger.’ The officer’s eye fell on the new decoration on the NCO’s burly chest. ‘Wound medal in silver, eh?’

  ‘Sir!’ Metzger bellowed. He raised his right hand to reveal that it was clad in a black glove.’ The Ivans did for me, sir. The bone-menders said that I’d never be able to use it again.’

  Von Dodenburg clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘Sorry about that, Metzger.’

  ‘No matter, sir,’ Metzger answered with false modesty. ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. Just got to soldier on – that’s all. Especially now when everybody’s against us.’

  Von Dodenburg nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right – we’ve all got to soldier on now. But do you think I could see the CO.’

  ‘Of course, sir. But I’d better just check.’

  Metzger turned and knocked very loudly on the inner door. He waited for what seemed a very long time, then stuck his head round the door carefully.

  ‘Major von Dodenburg, sir,’ he snapped.

  ‘Let him come – in a moment, Metzger,’ the Vulture’s familiar voice rasped from within.

  A moment later a small but beautiful young second-lieutenant in the Alpini came out of the inner office. In spite of the terrible heat, he had his greatcoat draped decoratively over his shoulders. He inclined his gleaming black head in von Dodenburg’s direction.

  ‘Chiaou’, he muttered, flashing the German a tremendous white smile, and leaving behind him an overpowering odour of cologne.

  ‘Who the hell is that?’ von Dodenburg asked.

  Metzger sniffed. ‘That spaghetti-eater seems to have six more teeth than anybody else I know,’ he grunted, but he did not enlighten von Dodenburg any further.

  The Vulture rose immediately when von Dodenburg went in. His face seemed a little flushed and he was tugging at his jacket, as if something had just disarranged it.

  ‘My dear von Dodenburg, how good to see you again – and congratulations on your promotion.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And how’s your head?’

  ‘Getting better, the bone-menders say. But God knows how I got hit there. I was wearing my helmet after all.’

  The Vulture offered him a seat. ‘Good job, you did. Apparently your tank bought it almost immediately, according to Schulze and the other chap who got you out. A minute later, my dear von Dodenburg, and you would not have got your promotion.’

  ‘And Sergeant Schulze, what of him?’

  ‘He seemed to have been badly wounded. He was bleeding severely at least when he brought you in. They bundled the lot of you in the ambulance and rushed you off to the rear.’ He shrugged and fumbled with his flies which von Dodenburg noted were undone. ‘He’s probably in some damn base hospital, trying to get the bone-menders to release him. And just now, von Dodenburg, I can use every experienced NCO and officer I can lay my hands on, if I’m going to get this battle group on its feet before the Amis reach Rome.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Schwarz is back now by the way, though he has to report to Number Two Ospedale Militaire every day. They’re fitting him up there with the arm. Luckily enough the Popovs shot off his left arm. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to take him back.’

  ‘Yes, lucky for him,’ von Dodenburg said ironically.

  ‘Schwarz’ll be my adjutant. It’ll be good to have him at my side because we’re expanding very fast. As for you von Dodenburg, I’d like you to take over the Panzer Grenadier battalion in the Battle Group.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. If we go on like this, we’ll be a division before we know where we are,’ von Dodenburg added with a laugh. But the Vulture did not return his laugh. He was deadly serious.

  ‘That is exactly my plan, von Dodenburg. Now listen to what we’re going to do …’

  What followed was a race against time. The Allies landed at Salerno. Mussolini, the deposed Italian dictator, was found and rescued from his Italian captors by the paras and an unknown SD man named Skorzeny. The Pact of Steel fell apart and in Rome the paras went into action against their one-time Allies. The Amis broke out of their Salerno bridgehead and drove for Naples. But otherwise events, as tremendous as they were, went unnoticed by the Vulture and his tiny staff.

  One night the CO got the young captain commanding the paras guarding the HQ area drunk. The man had gained his jump wings back in 1941, but he still had to make his first combat jump. The Vulture worked on him all night. The next morning the disgruntled young para volunteered himself and his whole company for Battle Group Wotan.

  With the aid of the beautiful young Lieutenant from the Alpini, the Vulture organised a squad to steal the demonstration company of Tigers which had been loaned to the Alpini at their training ground just outside Rome. Suddenly one morning, the men of Wotan woke up to find they were the possessors of ten brand-new Tigers, over which their officers sweated in the first rays of the sun to remove the Italian markings.

  Schwarz was flown to the Wehrmacht’s main military prison at Torgau and brought back with him half a company of ‘volunteers’ who preferred Wotan to the grim glasshouse and the possibility of a transfer to Penal Battalion 999. After the first deserter had been brought back and shot publicly by the Vulture himself, the ‘Torgau Volunteers’ settled down and attempted to soldier.

  Von Dodenburg himself drove into the mountainous area around the northern city of Bolzano and brought back half a hundred big, rawboned Tyrolean farm boys who were officially Italian citizens, but who were as German as the Führer himself – although von Dodenburg could not understand a word they said when they spoke their own native dialect.

  The new Battle Group took shape rapidly, though as Metzger was heard complaining more often than once, ‘they’re like the crappy Foreign Legion plus the crappy glasshouse cast-offs!’ And indeed they were a very tough bunch, von Dodenburg thought as he watched them on the morning parades, very unlike the enthusiastic, idealistic young men who had flocked to the Wotan’s standard in 1939. These men – paras, military criminals and veterans of the Citadel fiasco – had no illusions, no beliefs and no loyalty save to themselves and Battle Group Wotan.

  ‘My dear von Dodenburg, ‘the Vulture commented on one such morning as they marched off for training, ‘to borrow a phrase from that Tommy general who helped our own Marshal Blucher to win the Battle of Waterloo, I don’t know whether they’ll frighten the enemy, but by God, they put the wind up me.’

  Von Dodenburg had grinned. They ‘put the wind up’ him, too. But time was running out. All further recruiting stopp
ed as did all training. The Battle Group went on Stage Two Alert. Hastily those of the new recruits who could drive or knew how to fire a cannon were placed in the Group’s armoured component to fill the gaps in the Tiger crews; the rest were put into von Dodenburg’s panzer grenadiers. As the Vulture remarked, tugging at the end of his great nose cynically:

  ‘They’ll train themselves after all. The ones who survive will be trained, and the ones who get their silly heads blown off will serve as an example to the others that it pays to learn one’s job well in the SS.’

  The younger officer was forced to agree: the situation in Southern Italy was far too serious to be worried about such trivia as training. The front could break down at any moment.

  ‘Besides,’ the Vulture added, ‘everyone knows that the Amis and the Tommies can’t fight. Kill their officers and they run around in panic like chickens with their heads chopped off. After all it is common knowledge that the Anglo-Americans show very little initiative.’

  But in spite of the weakness of the Battle Group’s training, von Dodenburg worked flat out to ensure that his panzer grenadiers had the best possible equipment, returning to his billet at night blind with fatigue or when he couldn’t sleep because of excessive fatigue, drinking himself into insensibility with one of the whores in the officers’ brothel in the Mario di Fiori red light district.

  On the day that the Tommy 8th Army joined up with the Amis east of Eboli and commenced the last phase of their attack on Naples, the Vulture assembled the Battle Group and told them they would be moving out to meet the enemy the following morning. Von Dodenburg flashed a look down the grey-clad ranks of his own panzer grenadiers. There seemed no reaction to the news. Most of the new recruits were still hungover from the night before’s drinking bout and the clean-living farmboys from the Tyrol probably hadn’t understood a word the Vulture had spoken in his clipped Prussian accent. Even if they had, he told himself with a faint grin, it would take another thirty minutes before the news penetrated their thick mountain brains.

  The Vulture standing on an ammunition box in the centre of the ancient barracks square, surrounded by fine, florid Italian baroque buildings, squeezed in his monocle more firmly, and rasped:

  ‘The morning will be devoted to packing the gear. The rest of the day is yours – and the night.’ He smiled thinly, but there was no response from the Group.

  Out of the corner of his eye, von Dodenburg caught a glimpse of bright canary yellow. The Alpini Lieutenant’s flashy Fiat sports car slid into the shade of the fine tall cypresses which bordered one side of the square. He waved lazily at the Vulture. The Vulture flushed lightly and went on faster:

  ‘You may do as you wish. Two things, however – don’t get the pox. I shall regard that as a court-martial offence and I don’t need to tell you how self-inflicted wounds are punished in the present crisis. The other is – be back at zero six hundred hours, ready to march.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Good hunting – and good shooting tonight. Dismiss!’

  As Metzger supervised the march-off, von Dodenburg attempted to ask the Vulture for his orders for the day. But the CO had no time. His eyes were fixed strangely on the beautiful young officer waiting for him in the bright yellow car.

  ‘Lothario is there,’ he said thickly, ‘and time is so short – so damnably short.’ He strode off hurriedly, calling over his shoulder. ‘If you have any questions, ask Schwarz!’

  Thoughtfully von Dodenburg walked over to Schwarz. He looked at him significantly, but there was nothing but madness in his red eyes.

  ‘Well, Schwarz,’ he said. ‘If the CO can do it, so can we. What about a drink and then the Mario di Fiori.’

  ‘Anything you say, von Dodenburg.’ He slapped his wooden hand against his pistol holster. ‘As long as we are armed – one can’t trust these Italians.’

  Von Dodenburg laughed. ‘I’m always armed, Schwarz when I go into the Mario di Fiori, but a little differently than you think.’

  On the way to their quarters they met Metzger. He flung them a manificent salute, his right-hand jacket pocket bulging with worthless Lire notes for the girls in the red-light district:

  ‘Permission to dismiss, sir?’ he roared in his best sergeant-major fashion.

  Von Dodenburg looked at him in mock severity. ‘Dismiss, Sergeant Metzger! A good NCO is never off duty, especially in the Wotan. You can take over the Group office for the day. After all you’ll be on a cushy number after today as a virtual non-combattant.’ He indicated Metzger’s gloved right hand. Metzger flushed, but said nothing. When they were safely out of earshot, however, he cursed thickly.

  ‘Officers, I’ve shit em! A lot of pimps, poufs and pissing buck-passers; that’s all the bastards are.’ And with that he passed inside to give the duty clerks hell for the rest of that long September day.

  The Mario di Fiori was doing booming business. Heavy-breasted, dark-eyed Italian whores with lazy hips and their skinny pimps in their uniform pin-striped suits were importuning the men in field-grey everywhere, as they wandered up and down the cobbled, grass-overgrown streets looking for adventure. Here and there there were long impatient queues of soldiers outside the official army brothels, which had been reserved for the Italian Army and which still charged the same low prices.

  Just opposite there were equally long queues, supervised by hard-faced, suspicious-eyed ‘chain dogs’: men waiting to carry out the prescribed anti-VD treatment after having visited the whores, standing like so many animals at long zinc troughs to squirt wine-red potassium permanganate mixture into their penises to kill any possible infection.

  The two SS officers swaggered through the waiting men, as if they were not there, and although the ‘stubble-hoppers’ grumbled they got out of the way swiftly enough.

  ‘What I fancy,’ von Dodenburg was just saying, ‘is a nice little blonde – neat and trim and not too hefty like these Italian women,’ when they swung round the corner and bumped into the crowd of private soldiers, grouped round the women. Von Dodenburg broke off suddenly and gasped. He had rarely seen uglier women than the three who were the centre of the crowd. The first one was little more than a dwarf, her face as pale as death and her dark hair cropped, as if she had just escaped from a nunnery; the second was enormously fat and cross-eyed; whilst the third was a head taller than himself and had an enormous lump growing out of her right temple like a bullock’s horn.

  But it wasn’t the three women who kept his attention; it was the voice of the man who was obviously their pimp. The man, dressed in rough civilian clothes, had his back to them as he praised the sexual talents of his three ‘mares’, as he kept calling them to the laughing soldiers. But there was no mistaking that cheeky waterfront voice.

  ‘I calls them Faith, Hope and Charity,’ he was saying. ‘The little short-arsed one here, she’s Faith because she doesn’t spread them for money. No, not at all! She’s more a – you might say – charitable institution – she wants your green leaves2 so that you won’t spend it on the demon drink. She gives it to the Pope – personally! As for Hope here, the one with the four-eyes – you know you could put yer head between them knockers on her and think you was deaf – she’s hoping that a real man will come along one of these days who’s got a whanger big enough to get close to her and give her a real thrill.’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but it’s true – she’s still a virgin!’

  ‘Schulze!’ von Dodenburg bellowed, finding his voice at last.

  The pimp swung round as if he had been shot, his forefinger still raised in praise of his ‘mares’. The ruddiness had gone from his face and he had a fresh, livid scar over his right eye, but there was no mistaking him. It was Schulze all right.

  His mouth dropped open as he muttered, ‘Great crap on the Christmas Tree, it’s Captain von Dodenburg …’

  Schwarz had departed upstairs with Faith. Schulze took a deep swig at his red wine and then licking his suddenly dry lips launched into his story.

  ‘You
see it was like this, sir. By the way congratulations on your promotion—’

  ‘Get on with it, Schulze,’ von Dodenburg interrupted threateningly. ‘None of your soft soap.’

  ‘Well, we’d rescued you from the Tiger, with that nasty bang on the head you got. As soon as we managed to get you to a dressing station, they decided to keep us too. We were both hit, me and Hartmann. And a couple of twenty rouble pieces didn’t hurt either. So all three of us was whipped on the Red Cross train to Lvov General Hospital.’

  ‘That’s where I woke up,’ Von Dodenburg said. Above his head the springs of Faith’s bed were creaking mightily. ‘But you weren’t there. Nor Hartmann.’

  ‘No, sir, well you see we decided that we might get cured quicker and return sooner to the Battalion if we received treatment in the Reich. You know how it is? Anyway we got to Munich and we sort of decided there that we should go south. A doctor we got to know at the military hospital in Schwabing said the air would heal our wounds sooner in Austria and we did want to get back to the Battalion. He signed the paper assigning us to the hospital at Bad Ischl. And then we was out for a walk one day, we must have missed our way and there we were in spaghetti-land. Of course, we wanted to come straight back. But we thought one day more or less wouldn’t do any harm. I always heard that Italy’s a great place for culture. Didn’t Schiller come down here or something?’ He looked at von Dodenburg inquiringly.

  ‘Goethe,’ the officer corrected.

  ‘Well, I knew it was one of them singers a long time back. So we thought what was good enough for them was good enough for us.’ Above them the squeaking of the rusty bed-springs had stopped, but little bits of plaster were still drifting down on their heads.

  ‘Well, go on,’ von Dodenburg prompted. ‘How did your excursion into culture land you in your present – er – business?’ He pointed a finger upwards.

  ‘It was Hartmann, sir. The bastard, if you’ll forgive the expression? He wanted to look at the boats at Genoa.’