by Tom Zola
"Herr ... Herr Unterfeldwebel, I'm standing at… "
"No, Comrade Lace-up! You aren’t," screamed Pappendorf as he spit in Berning's face. The sergeant reflexively closed his eyes, as if his platoon leader were about to beat him at any moment.
"H.Dv. 130/2a, first chapter, page eight. The left foot is slightly placed in the forward position!"
"Yes, Sir." Berning immediately took a tiny step forward with his left foot. To Pappendorf, such little things were sometimes enough to get punished with an extra watch shift. Once the staff sergeant even gave one poor landser one week of arrest, after he had caught him three times with an "improper" uniform. Pappendorf was one dangerous fellow.
"I expect my NCOs to know the rules!" he hissed. Berning – embarrassed on the outside – burned inside with a true firestorm of rage.
There are 10,000 regulations in the Wehrmacht, you gorilla! How can one expect to know them all? he raved inwardly, but nevertheless had to admit that Pappendorf – although he certainly did not know everything – had always been able to quote the document corresponding to a situation.
"Gee, Berning!" rustled Pappendorf at the end of his tirade. Once again, the platoon leader had humiliated him in front of all his comrades. The staff sergeant then continued with his lecture. For three quarters of an hour he recited about the interaction of tank killers and infantrymen, explained to his men how to communicate with the tank men, how to assign targets to them by tracer bullets, and how to fight disembarked enemy soldiers out with the machine gun.
Berning attended the class with an exhaustion that threatened to collapse him; but also with a hatred that made him tremble.
At some point the large wooden door to the barn opened, and Lieutenant Balduin, commanding officer of the squadron, entered. His most prominent distinguishing feature was a very clearly receding chin. Balduin had joined the squadron straight from the replacement depot. Despite his lack of combat experience, he had shown himself to be a useful commander in the battles of the last few days.
Pappendorf interrupted his speech in the middle of a word and yelled: "Achtung!" Immediately he and his soldiers stood still. Then he duly reported to the officer.
"Unterfeldwebel Pappendorf, step forward," the lieutenant said with a pleased undertone.
"Jawohl, Herr Leutnant." Pappendorf took a step forward and stood directly opposite Balduin with his lips pressed against each other and his chest thrust out.
"Herr Unterfeldwebel," Balduin began, "since you took over the platoon, you have led it in exemplary fashion. In the struggle for Naryshkino, the 2nd Platoon under your leadership destroyed four enemy tanks. I’m promoting you to master sergeant."
Balduin smiled broadly and shook Pappendorf's hand.
"Give me your service book, will ya? I'll directly register the promotion."
Pappendorf did as he was told. None of those present noticed at that moment that one German non-commissioned officer with Austrian origin was standing in the front row, threatening to burst with rage – his fingers quaking and his thoughts already reaching for his rifle.
Mikoyanovka, Soviet Union, June 4th, 1943
The captured Tiger's last hour had come when the sun set. While the Russian airborne attack had been repelled and the Red Army had lost an entire battalion of valuable paratroopers, the surviving partisans had fled back into the forest. Only the tankers of that damned Tiger had not yet recognized their unfortunate sitrep, and continued to sprinkle the grassland plain with explosive rounds. This way they tried to scare the Germans off, since both tracks of their Tiger were torn to pieces. Their tank could move no more. And it should run out of ammunition any moment now.
The German panzers had withdrawn behind the airfield and thus outside the range of the Tiger, because the order had been given not to destroy the hijacked tank, but to recapture it as intact as possible, since every single combat vehicle was valuable to a German army that was on its last legs.
Now the still-furious steely predator menacing the airstrip was crept up on from two sides by German panzergrenadiers. Like ants overpowering a huge beetle, they finally jumped on the hull of the Tiger. The turret of the tank began to beat angrily at the soldiers, and to shake like a dog's tail. The Tiger’s MG barked, but the infantrymen stayed out of its effective range. Muzzles of submachine guns were inserted into all openings, triggers were pressed. The salvos resounded through the inside of the tank with a clanging sound. The Tiger didn't move no more. The Red Army had lost this battle – but with the help of a bold airborne assault and the support of partisans, it had inflicted considerable losses on the German armored forces in the area without using a single tank. 29 combat vehicles of Panzer Regiment 2 were destroyed or left in need of repair on the plain, and another seven wreckages of former panzers were located directly on the runways of the airfield. The regiment had finally been whittled down to a battalion - and 9th Company had ceased to exist.
Engelmann and his men, however, still existed. Meanwhile, Burgsdorff, the commander of Panzer Regiment 2, had summoned the battalion commanders and all company leaders to a location west of the airfield that was in between two tree-covered ground waves. The remaining operable panzers of the regiment collected themselves at the same time in the light forest that could be found behind those ground waves. Tall but thin birches rose up there and offered the German tanks at least a minimum of protection through their lush canopy of leaves. White bark, as wrinkled as the skin of a 100-year-old, peeled from the trunks. The thin trees were, in an emergency, no obstacle for a tank. In addition, the birch trees stood far enough apart so that the entire regiment could easily hide in the forest.
Engelmann and his crew squatted on the back hull of a Panzer IV of 10th Company, and were thus transported away from the battlefield and to the regiment's assembly point. The tank men of the regiment left their dead behind for the time being, because von Burgsdorff had called for haste. They, or other German forces, would later take care of the fallen.
The Panzer IV came to a halt, rattling, in front of one ground wave. Engelmann and his men jumped off, while the lieutenant called a word of thanks to the tank commander. Once he set off in search of the other officers between the ground waves, his crew remained in place – what else could they do? The regiment had finally run out of panzers to operate for them.
Lieutenant Engelmann spotted one of the other officers, just disappearing behind the crest of the ground wave, and followed him. As he did, he heard metal clanging on metal and the surging of aircraft engines echoing from the airfield at his back. He paid his comrades from the Luftwaffe respect in spirit, for the fact that they had endured so long directly at the front. But now they were hectically preparing for relocation, because if the enemy could somehow manage to break through here, the planes of two squadrons would fall into his hands. That would be a disaster. The last hours had delivered evidence enough that this threat was real.
Lieutenant Engelmann managed to find his regimental commander standing in a group of senior officers. Von Burgsdorff was a skinny man in his late 50s, sporting a Hitler memorial mustache on his upper lip, otherwise distinguished only by his extremely high forehead. A round pair of nickel-frame glasses were enthroned on his nose. In Engelmann's eyes, von Burgsdorff was a bungler – a lawyer whose military training and combat experience came from the last war – no comparison to his predecessor Sieckenius, who had climbed the career ladder based on his great performance in the battle for the Kursk salient. He was now the commander of the whole combat formation.
When the last officers arrived, von Burgsdorff immediately began his briefing. Right at the beginning, he pointed out that they had no time to lose. The regiment had to intervene instantly. Engelmann wrinkled his nose while listening to the words of his regimental commander. The situation was difficult: enemy breakthroughs in several front sectors. Belgorod was on the brink of being lost, and with it the whole southern connection to the troops near Kursk. Enemy airborne landings blocked the Belgorod-Stalino rai
lway line. Further west, a Russian armored attack formation had swept over the German lines, and had been stopped only at Nikolskoye – a mere 20 kilometers from the center of Belgorod. German positions were being contested by the Soviet forces on both sides of the Donets.
Engelmann shook his head. Kampfgruppe Sieckenius, which had been stuffed into holes everywhere in the front line as a emergency reserve, did not have enough quick reaction forces to be able to help everywhere. At the same time, he was horrified to discover that the Russians had done their homework. The enemy's paratroopers had been deployed specifically against German railway lines, connecting roads, airstrips, command posts, and telecommunication outposts before Russian main forces troops assaulted the front lines. Thus the Russians found the Germans in many places confused and weakened and unable to resupply and reorganize, and had therefore achieved all these small breakthroughs. It was the same old story: The Wehrmacht, which in 1939/1940 had put the world's most powerful armies in their place by conducting joint operations of infantry, artillery, the Luftwaffe and independently operating tank forces, taught its enemies the lessons of modern warfare with every battle. Neither the Western powers nor the Russians were so ossified as to be unable to adapt and evolve. In 1940, the Wehrmacht had fought against British formations that still used tanks exclusively as support weapons for the infantry, slowing them down and lessening their unique firepower. Now the Germans would no longer be lucky enough to meet such idiocies from the enemy. That was the way it was with the Soviets. Just when Engelmann, after countless encounters with the enemy, had again come to the conclusion that Ivan was merely taking everything in man and material that he could get hold of and threw it into battle, the Russians surprised him with such insights of warfare as the airborne assault in advance of an conventional attack. Now, however, it was necessary to find an appropriate response to the latest Russian attack moves – and Major General Sieckenius believed that he had found it in an advance against Nikolskoye. There the enemy stood closest to Belgorod, and there a Russian breakthrough was the greatest threat, because at this hour only two decimated companies with machine guns and two captured Russian AT-guns defended the whole city. By some miracle and the clever use of weapons, the defenders had been able to convince the Russians that there was a whole regiment or more entrenched there. But Ivan could not be led around by the nose indefinitely. So Panzer Regiment 2 had to march to the sound of the guns.
Von Burgsdorff ended his assessment with the sober statement that 9th Company no longer existed, but that the regiment structure would nevertheless be maintained.
At last one good idea from you, Engelmann commented to himself, while the officers were drifting apart with lead-gray faces.
It was clear to Engelmann that he was actually out of the game for the time being. Then, suddenly, a shiver came over him as a completely different idea came to his mind: he had already had to hand over four of his tankers and all of his replacement men; that was when the Kampfgruppe Sieckenius had been build overnight, and the order was given that anyone who could not be accommodated in a tank would be temporarily integrated into the infantry, because every single company fighting in the sector of Army Group Center badly needed men to fill up their ranks. The poor devils from Engelmann's unit were now wandering around with all the dogfaces, a rifle in their hands and nothing more than a wet foxhole to sleep, live, and fight in.
At first the lieutenant had assumed that he would be attached to the impedimenta – a truly horrible fate for a soldier and officer like Engelmann, who did not want to see his men in battle while he himself sat in the viewing stand. But now it occurred to him that an even worse fate could come to pass for his crew and for him; that of improvised infantrymen.
"Josef?" The somber voice of the 12th’s commander ripped Engelmann away from his thoughts. The lieutenant shook himself briefly, then he looked around and saw a big captain trudge up to him. Engelmann shook hands with his comrade. They exchanged serious looks.
"I'm sorry about your men," whispered Captain Arno Stollwerk, a man with grey-blue eyes and a rugged visage who originated from the outskirts of Gdańsk. The sigils of the disbanded Waffen SS flashed on his collar. Stollwerk had never made a secret of where he came from – and since he was a good soldier and officer, his superiors let him carry on with this improper uniform.
"Yes." Engelmann could only nod.
"Do you still have your crew?"
"Yeah, we got lucky. Not a scratch." Engelmann smiled weakly.
"Well, as luck would have it, I have a panzer for you – a III. No scratches, either."
Engelmann gaped at Stollwerk, eyes opened wide.
"Just follow me. My boys took the tin can with them to the assembly point."
Engelmann nodded and could not suppress his joy. He straightaway felt ebullient.
"But you should take a few minutes and clean the inside," the captain finally added with a sharp voice. "Those forsaken Bolsheviks have made a godawful mess in that tank; I can tell you."
*
Meanwhile night had arrived, throwing its dark cloak over the land. The regiment advanced in column formation at the paved main road to Belgorod, and from there the German panzers now took the road to Nikolskoye. On their way to Belgorod, they had come across Russian forces at one point blocking the road. A vanguard of the enemy had apparently slipped through the German lines and positioned itself in wait directly in front of the gates of Belgorod. But the regiment was needed more urgently in Nikolskoye, which was why the watchword was given to step on the gas, break through, and push on to the regiment's destination.
The breakthrough had been accomplished. Now the panzers of the regiment were on the road to the south, and a few kilometers before them – wrapped in complete darkness – opened up to Nikolskoye, a small village with only a few hundred inhabitants, of whom most had escaped the war by fleeing. Its strategic importance lay in the bridge over the River Toplinka, a narrow tributary of the Donets, because to the west of the Toplinka's source the area was marshy and therefore not passable at all. Of course, the river could also be crossed without a bridge, but that would take time due to the steep embankments in many places, especially to get vehicles and tanks across. And around Nikolskoye itself, the ground was swampy and difficult to traverse, so that in this front section all ways over the river went through this battle-tossed town, where every house had already been barraged to ruins.
The long column of tanks and vehicles moved down the road with only blackout lights switched on and at half speed, so that it was difficult to navigate either by eye or ear. Covered little lamps pointed downward, illuminating tiny segments of the road ahead, and the little pools of light moved evenly towards the south. In the area just ahead of the regiment’s advance, lightning flashed as gunfire and the rattle of small arms slowly swelled to a new concert of death. The last remaining officer in Nikolskoye, a captain named Droste, asked the staff of Kampfgruppe Sieckenius almost every minute when the reinforcements would arrive. The Reds were already probing his positions again, and had belatedly realized that there were only a handful of Germans left manning the defenses.
"Not so much gas, Hans," Engelmann warned when his driver let the tank get too close to the panzer ahead again. Münster made an annoyed sound, but obeyed.
With set faces, Engelmann and his crew remained in their new Panzer III and endured its rumbling and rattling. The tankers were overtired and exhausted. The fatigue was close to shutting their eyes. Münster stared apathetically through his narrow eye slit into the darkness outside, where he could barely recognize the tank driving in front of him as a blunt outline in the twilight of the camouflage lighting.
Within the column, they rolled along with 12th Company, which Engelmann now graced with his own expertise. In their new tank, it stank with the horrible sour smell of corpses – the bodies of the dead crew had fermented in the evening sun for an hour. Due to the lack of time and the dwindling light, Engelmann and his men had not been able to completely remov
e all the blood – the interior of the vehicle had virtually been awash in the red ink of life. They had only wiped it once with two blankets, which weren’t particularly absorbent. The armatures, levers, and chairs in the tank were still sticky. Engelmann thanked the Lord that it was now too dark to see where he had reached again. In the dim glow of the interior lighting, he, however, sensed the dried blood sticking to his hands, and he was delighted that no one had been burned in this tank. Not only because it had to be a cruel death, but also because Engelmann, strangely enough, had a feeling that he couldn't stand the smell anymore since experiencing it when his former loader Eduard Born had been hit during the Russian outbreak attempt in the pocket of Kursk.
"That's disgusting!" Ludwig kept moaning and shaking. He had sat down directly in a pool of blood that they had completely overlooked while cleaning. Now his trousers were wet and clotted, as the blood dried slowly. A wet pair of trousers would certainly not have bothered anyone considering the level of heat in the panzer. But the knowledge of what was really stuck on their uniforms and hands tugged at the nerves of the men in a way that hunger or cold could not.
Ludwig licked his chapped lips. Engelmann looked over at him. In the darkness, a pale pair of eyes glanced out from Ludwig's dirt-crusted face, an expression full of fatigue and listlessness. The facial expressions of the others were not much different.
"I am thirsty to death," Ludwig whispered. "And I could puke if I think too hard about what we're sitting in here."
"Thirsty? Goddamn right," Münster responded and rubbed his face. "But I'll puke if I have another sip of that salty tea we've had for days." Ludwig nodded heftily, and Jahnke also signaled approval.
Engelmann felt the same way, but as a military leader, he was not allowed to participate in the moaning of his men. Instead, he said, "Stay on your toes a little longer. Only this village left, then they will let us get some rest ... they have to."