Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  Irina was concerned at the black mood that had descended on our group. “Don’t you think you can beat the Russians, Jurgen?”

  “No, not at all. Of course we can beat them, but most battles are decided by on who makes the least mistakes and they have such vast resources that we can’t afford to make any. Our soldiers, armour and equipment is the finest in Europe, but we cannot afford to lose too many of them, what we need are commanders, leaders and generals who fight skilfully, not throw their divisions into battles they cannot win and then refuse to withdraw them to fight another day when things are not going well.”

  “Isn’t that what your leader, Adolf Hitler is reputed to do? Throw whole armies away uselessly on battles that are already lost.”

  I smiled. “You didn’t hear that from me.”

  I sensed that she was thawing, I could hardly blame her for feeling such bitterness towards Germany but I had personally done nothing except try to help her. When we got back to Kharkov I decided I’d try to break down the barriers and restore something of a relationship. We spent the rest of the day dozing, keeping under the cover of the trees. When it started to get dark we began to pack our gear ready to return. Bauer slid down to join us, he was the to keep watch at the top of the hill.

  “Anything new, Stefan?”

  “I’m not sure, Sir. There is a squadron of Cossacks roaming around, they’re not anywhere near us, I hope they’ve disappeared somewhere else.”

  “Very well, let’s go.”

  We mounted up and rode away, this time Beidenberg took the lead a hundred metres in front of us. We retraced our route in and managed to get to the balka that would take us across the lines. Beidenberg came back on foot, leading his horse. He signalled us urgently to dismount.

  “They’ve blocked the ravine with a tank, a sodding great T34 parked right across it.”

  “I suppose it was inevitable,” Mundt said. “They’re putting much of their armour in defilade ready for our attack, the balka was too good for them to ignore.”

  “That’s all very well, but we need to get past it. Irina, do you have any suggestions?”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve no idea at all. The only possibility, and it's a maybe, is that we could cross open ground and get back into the balka just before the front line.”

  “It’s a hell of a risk, they’ve got troops every where patrolling this close to the German lines.”

  “We haven’t got any choice,” Mundt said. “It’s either that or we’re stuck here for the duration, Sir.”

  I weighed up the odds. Whichever way we handled it, the risks were severe.

  “Very well, we’ll do it. I suggest we retrace our steps for half a kilometre and we’ll give that tank a wide berth.”

  We turned the horses around and went back over the dark ground until Irina said that we could push through some natural cover that would skirt the tank. It was a group of small trees, low mounds that were scarcely large enough to be classed as hills and between them the darkness of the shallow valleys that would keep us away from Russian eyes. I was tired, so very tired. I hadn’t slept very much in days. I may have fallen into a waking sleep, where the mind goes on autopilot, but I suddenly felt uneasy. We were still mounted, walking the horses so as not to make too much noise or risk them tripping on unseen cracks and holes in the ground. The familiar jingle of the harness was soothing and gentle in the background, I realised that someone was talking and was about to warn them to be quiet when I recognised the language. It was Russian.

  I strained my eyes to see and listened hard, as well as my platoon ahead and behind me, there was another line of horse moving in the same direction, perhaps three metres to my left. It was incredible, we’d run into a squadron of Cossacks and neither of us had noticed the other, we were just troops mounted on horseback. Mundt was behind me, I slowed my horse until he caught up and then pointed to the left, putting my finger on my lips for absolute quiet. His eyes went wide as he realised the danger. There were about ten of them, I put up ten fingers and showed him and he inclined his head in agreement. We edged slightly further away from them and I whispered to him, “Can you get everyone to make sure they’re ready, when we get near the lines we’ll give them a burst from the MP38s and then make a run for it.”

  He eased his horse back to our line and went up and down the right side, away from the Cossacks, making them aware of the danger. I could dimly see them gripping their machine pistols, I already had mine held ready. It was the best we could do, we rode on, each step taking us nearer to the front line. I thought we were going to make it, we were less than half a kilometre away and the Cossacks started to wheel away to their left, away from us. Then one of them turned and called out a question in Russian. He repeated it when he got no answer, then moved his horse nearer. He called out for a third time, then the night was ripped apart to the sound of automatic fire as Bauer opened up on him, hurling him from his saddle. The muzzle flashes lit up the night and we could momentarily see the Cossacks against the sky. The rest of us opened fire, a deafening tornado of gunfire that tore into the Russian riders, some were hit and went sprawling on the ground, two or three survived and rode of rapidly into the darkness.

  “That’s it, we need to hurry before they come back with reinforcements!”

  I spurred my horse into a gallop and surged forward, the others were recovering from the shock and encouraging their horses on. We all galloped forward, a mad dash that swept us past a pair of startled Soviet sentries, one of my people fired a quick burst that made them jump back into cover, then we were through, crossing the last four hundred metres of open steppe until we circled around a ruined stone wall.

  “Wer ist da?” The familiar sound of German, 'who is there'?

  “We’re German, a reconnaissance party, don’t shoot!” I shouted. “Everyone, get off your horses and identify yourselves to the sentries!”

  We were surrounded by sentries who were suspicious and pointing their machine pistols at us. In the darkness I made out a tank, one of our older Panzer IVs, the commander was in the turret manning the mounted MG34. Slowly, we got off the horses and I went over to show my documents.

  “If you can contact General Hoth’s headquarters he will vouch for us.”

  The Oberleutant in the turret said, “Don’t worry, my friend, I’ll be doing that right now. In the meantime, keep your hands where we can see them!”

  It took him ten long minutes to make contact using the radio in his tank patched through to Hoth’s communications centre, but eventually he told us we could lower our hands, we were home. An hour later we reached Hoth’s mobile command truck, the General was awake and waiting for us. I made our report and we were dismissed.

  We rode slowly back to the stables in Kharkov and roused Wegener out of bed to deal with the horses. Bauer and Beidenberg came over to speak to me.

  “What did they General think, Sir, will they act on what we saw? Maybe they could send in the Luftwaffe to hammer the Russian tanks, like we did in 1941.”

  “I’m not sure what he thought, my friends. And this is not 1941. The Soviets have hundreds of fighters that are as good as anything we can put up in the air. If we send in slow moving bombers or tank destroyers, like the Stukas retro fitted with a 37mm anti-tank cannon under each wing, they’ll just send up several squadrons of fighters to shoot them down.”

  “We’ve got our own fighters, haven’t we, Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s?”

  “We have, yes, but not enough, Bauer. We’re short of everything, aircraft, fuel, armour, spare parts, everything.”

  “Does that mean we’re beaten before we even start, Sir?” asked Beidenberg.

  I’d gone too far, allowing my own misgivings to affect the morale of my unit. I smiled to take the edge off my pessimism. “It doesn’t mean that at all. Remember, we’re the best army in Europe, if not the world. No one can beat us when we make up our minds to fight hard. We’ll smash them all the way back to Moscow, there is no way the Red Army can
stand against us!”

  They nodded gratefully and we looked across to the next street as a loud roaring noise and clanking of tracks announced a line of tanks manoeuvring towards the front. We counted them, there were perhaps twenty but they were all Panzer IIIs, which we’d all understood were obsolete, too lightly armoured and mounting a gun that was not powerful enough to fight the T34s. Like so many of our resources, we were so short that we were throwing everything into the battle, even these outgunned Panzers. Bauer caught my eye.

  “So is that what we’re going to use to smash those T34s we saw all the way back to Moscow?”

  Chapter Eight

  ‘The Red Army and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages...onward, to victory!’

  Stalin

  It was still dark, the morning of the fifth of July 1943. The mass of armour waiting all around us was astonishing, more than any of us had ever seen in four years of war. Hundreds of tanks of all descriptions, from the humble Panzer IIIs that had entered service in the 1930s to the newest Tigers, the Panzer VI with its enormous 88mm main gun and the newer Panzer Vs that so many hopes were pinned on. Along our front artillery were deployed, the crews manning their guns with stacks of ammunition and the gun tractors ready to limber up and follow the advance as it progressed into the salient. We had dozens of STuGIIIs, the Self Propelled Assault Guns built on the Panzer IV chassis that had proved to be more effective than most when repelling and attacking Soviet Armour. At intervals in the line were the fearsome new Panzerjager Tigers, nicknamed the Elefants. With their massive 200mm armour and 88mm gun, they were expected to perform well and clear the T34s from our path, although they carried no auxiliary machine gun and were almost without protection from close infantry attack. We also had many Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, too outdated and lightly armoured to tangle with the heavier Soviet armour, but still effective against more lightly armoured Soviet mechanised forces. We waited in our Hanomag SD251 half-track, one of hundreds of Panzer-Grenadier companies lined up to provide support and covering fire to the Panzers that were so vulnerable to infantry armed with anti-tank weapons. We were towing a Pak 36 anti-tank gun, an obsolete weapon that had earned the nickname the ‘doorknocker’ because against the frontal armour of the T34 it was all it could achieve, to give it a sharp knock without penetrating. The geniuses in Germany had produced a shaped charge called a Stielgranate, it meant that the Pak 36 could penetrate any armour, but only at a range of less than three hundred metres. Unfortunately, the shell needed to be loaded from the muzzle rather than the breech behind the shield, which made the job of the loader highly dangerous on the battlefield when storms of bullets and shell fragments flew in every direction.

  I had mixed feelings about the intelligence I’d brought back from our reconnaissance mission to Prokhorovka. General Hoth and his staff had listened attentively as I read our observations from my notebook.

  “A good job, Obersturmfuhrer, my thanks. We will take everything you have said into consideration,” he said warmly, turning away in dismissal. I felt that he hadn’t listened to a word I’d said.

  “General, none of what I’ve told you is imagined, it’s all real, they’re well dug in behind layers of defences, minefields and hundred of anti-tank weapons and artillery, quite apart from the tanks.”

  He’d whirled back around, reddening in anger. “So what would you have me do? The Fuhrer has dictated that we will attack at dawn on the fifth of July. Do you suggest I refuse an order? Perhaps you’d like to give him your opinion?”

  He stood glowering at me and I realised that he was trapped, just like the rest of us, a prisoner of his oath to Adolf Hitler and his duty as an army officer to follow orders. I stood rigidly at attention, after a few moments he slackened.

  “I believe your report in every detail, Hoffman and we will do our best to allow for the difficulties you outline, more than that I cannot do. Now, I suggest you re-join your unit and prepare as best you can for the coming battle.”

  Now we were assembled in the darkness ready to begin the attack and there were still so many imponderables. The Lucy spy ring a huge question mark, had our security department, the Gestapo and the SD, really managed to track down and destroy the traitor, or had they managed to give Stalin our plans so that we would be going into a gigantic armoured trap? I hadn’t seen von Betternich or Wiedel since we’d got back and the date of the attack was announced. Had they arrested some poor devil and incarcerated them deep in some dark cellar, where they were busily torturing them, ripping out fingernails to try and extract information? I didn’t speculate any more, the guns opened fire, a shattering cacophony of noise that battered at my senses. At five o’clock hundreds of guns opened fire at a single signal, the darkness turned to bright light as a multitude of flashes announced the opening salvo, but it was not our salvo. My worst fears were realised as the Soviets launched a pre-emptive artillery barrage that had us all diving for cover. Staff officers ran frantically up and down the line re-organising our guns and within a short time they were ready for our own opening salvo. Tanks and assault guns joined in, firing repeatedly and inside the salient lit up with explosions. The barrage was planned to last for an hour, first counter-battery fire and then the immense, shattering barrages that were designed to destroy the enemy inside their bunkers and fortifications. The Russians shifted their aim to counter-battery fire and we began to move forward, away from the guns that offered such tempting targets to the enemy. The rain was pouring down in torrents, making it almost impossible to see where we were going, even our half-tracks slipped on the gradients as they struggled to grip the treacherous mud.

  Finally we broke out of the worst of the soft ground and began to make progress over the steppe. Our first objective was a hill in the distance and through the rain we could see our Tigers charging across the steppes, the mine-clearing teams worked frantically to keep up with them and when they detected a mine they lay alongside it to mark its position, there was no time to do more. Bauer gripped the wheel tightly as we bumped and jolted along, Mundt manned the forward MG34 and Wesserman the rear. From time to time Soviet infantry popped up with anti-tank rifles and we headed straight for them while Mundt and Wesserman fired streams of bullets that sent them tumbling back into their holes in the ground. We stopped briefly to check that one Soviet gunner was dead but we’d only managed to wound him badly in the stomach. It was a fatal wound, there was only one thing left to do, Mundt pointed the gun down and sent a short burst into him that smashed the remaining life out of him. Perhaps many people would consider it inhumane, but if I ever received such an agonising and fatal wound I hoped that my enemy would deliver a similar coup-de-grace. I picked up his rifle and put it in the half-track to take back with us for later inspection, it was a PTRD-41, ProtivoTankovoye Ruzhyo Degtyaryova, an anti-tank rifle produced and used from early 1941 by the Soviets. It was a single-shot weapon firing a 14.5mm round, although unable to penetrate the frontal armour of our heavy Panzers, it could penetrate the thinner sides of earlier models as well as our more thinly armoured self-propelled assault guns and of course our half-tracks.

  I gave the order and Bauer started forward again, racing to catch up with the Panzers. They were making good time and we had to go at full speed to catch up. We were approaching the start of the slope and already the Soviets were pouring fire down on us. Just in time one of our assault guns spotted a Russian KV-1 heavy tank, dug in at the side of the slope, only the movement of its turret alerted our gunners who fired three 88mm rounds in quick succession from the STuGIIIs that destroyed their target. We lurched up the slope and into a gale of fire, machine gunners, riflemen and light anti-tank weapons were all deployed against us. Against the intense fire the mine clearing teams had no chance and we had to just keep going, but we were lucky on that occasion and no mines were encountered. Then we broached the top of the hill just as a company of T34s was rolling forwards to meet our attack. We
attempted to keep the infantry in check while the armour slogged it out, gun to gun, for possession of the hill.

  On that occasion our Tigers totally outclassed the Russians, they poured tight, accurate disciplined fire on the Russians and we lost one Tiger that simply exploded to a direct hit, to eight T34s destroyed. Five of them were completely destroyed by multiple hits, the other three were damaged and immobilised, we saw the crews bailing out and diving for cover but machine guns from Panzers and half-tracks swept the immediate area around them and most were cut down in the open.

  More T34s appeared in the distance heading towards us and the turrets of the Panzers swung around to begin engaging. I shouted for Mundt.

  “Willy, deploy the PAK 36, we need to cover the Panzers.”

  He nodded, put Voss on the machine gun and took three of the men to uncouple and prepare the gun. The rest of my Panzer Grenadiers jumped out and started to check the trenches and foxholes that littered the hilltop. A bullet whistled past my head, I shouted “Sniper,” just as the men jumped for cover, and several shots were fired in the direction that the bullet had come from. Mundt’s team worked feverishly to deploy the anti-tank gun, braving the flying metal that flew everywhere and the sniper that was hidden somewhere in front of us. One of the crew, Schutze Vogel, threw up his arms and collapsed to the ground as the crack of the sniper’s rifle announced another kill. We searched the terrain but the man was well hidden and it was impossible to discover his stand. All that could be done was to lay down a curtain of fire in his general direction and hope to keep his head down until we could deal with him. Voss and Wesserman poured machine gun fire towards him while Mundt set up the gun. Finally they were loaded and able to take shelter behind the shield. Immediately they sighted on a T34 that was less than two hundred metres to our front, I heard Willy shout ‘fire!’ and the weapon sent the missile hurtling towards the Russian. It hit the side of the tank, a direct hit on one of the fuel drums that the Soviets carried on the deck of the T34 and the whole armoured vehicle exploded in a sheet of flames and smoke. We were faced with the dilemma of reloading from the front while there was a sniper loose. I shouted to the machine gunners to keep up the rate of fire and Mundt bravely rushed out to load the projectile. He slammed it in the muzzle and turned to run back just as a bullet cracked out from the unseen sniper and whistled past the position he’d just vacated, it hit the armoured shield of the gun and ricocheted off to hit the side of his steel helmet. He flinched but ran behind the shelter of the gun, chased by a second bullet that the sniper snapped off to try and finish him. I shouted orders at the men.