by Tom Zola
Berning did not even notice that Sieglinde, coming from the canteen tent, was approaching the stand. It wasn't until she sat next to him that he became aware of her. Yet he made no effort to turn to her. He disliked any movement that wasn't absolutely necessary for survival.
"Guten Tag, Herr Unteroffizier," she greeted him in a sonorous voice.
"Grüss Gott," he replied listlessly.
"Did you like the food today?"
"So medium."
She slipped a little closer to him and was visibly embarrassed. Finally she bit her lower lip and said: "You know, when you need something, you can always come to me. Anytime. All right?"
"I know." Berning nipped every conversation in the bud. Long moments passed in which Sieglinde fought perceptibly with herself, whether she should venture a new advance or not. Finally she dared, but her now slightly-brittle voice already revealed that she could no longer bear many rejections. "May I ask you a question?
"Mhm."
"Where exactly are you from? I find your dialect very beautiful to listen to."
"German Reich."
"Aha."
Minutes went by. In front of Berning's eyes, the footballers dribbled the ball back and forth. They roared and groaned with exertion or pain – and the mood of the German players worsened every second. No wonder: they were far behind. Suddenly Berning noticed that Sieglinde was crying softly.
Oh no, he thought. As it were, he cursed all women. Oh God no. Against the inner desire to simply get up and go back to his room, he forced himself to ask her why she was in such a gloomy mood. Sieglinde looked up with reddened eyes: "I'm simply afraid of the future," she admitted after a moment of irritation.
"Why?" Berning asked, like out of a pistol. No! Why can't I just shut the fuck up? he damned his rash mouth.
"American ships are said to be sailing off the coast of the island. Rumor has it they're coming. Why else would the Americans have occupied all these small Italian islands? But the Chancellor says they want to go to the Balkans and gather all the troops there. Even this General Rommel is there, and only two weeks ago they withdrew the unit in which an acquaintance of one of our nurses serves from Sicily and moved it to Yugoslavia."
"Mhm."
"What will become of us when the Americans come?"
Berning shrugged his shoulders. The Wehrmacht will work it out somehow, he thought. He wouldn't participate in it, not with his injuries. That was clear for him.
Finally, an elderly man in a wheelchair, who had to pay for his war service with his left foot, blew the final whistle. Immediately riots broke out among the players. The Italians had beaten the Germans 11 to 2. The two teams came at each other. They shouted, they laughed, they provoked. Men pushed others, yelled at each other, or were in each other's arms. Although the general mood among the players was still emotionally charged, it did not spill over into aggression. That could change quickly. In the end the Germans and the Italians went their separate ways, celebrating and shouting, whispering to each other like little girls and reproaching each other for individual situations in the previous game. Others congratulated themselves on good moves.
"Hey there, Tonti," one of the German players suddenly yelled to an Italian officer, who spoke German pretty well.
"What's the matter?" he replied with a weak accent.
"Do you know how many gears an Italian tank has?"
Tonti stared bitterly at the German, who raised his arms in a challenging manner, before the questioner revealed the solution: "Five reverse gears! And one forward gear for parades!"
The German crowd fell into a roaring laughter, while the Italians grumbled angrily.
"You!" Tonti suddenly huffed and pointed to the joke teller. "Shut your mouth!"
"What did you say?" another of the German players joined in and stormed at Tonti with his head held high. Threateningly, he pointed his index finger at the Italian. "You don't forbid a German to speak, you spaghetti-eater!"
"What did you call me, eh?"
Other Italians joined in the wild exchange of words and threw all kinds of Italian slurs at the Germans. The two teams approached each other with verbally-supported threatening gestures.
"I called you spaghetti-eater, spaghetti-eater!" the one with the red skull went on, mocking. But Tonti did not put up with such insults. He struck so fast that his opponent lay on the ground with his lip popped open before he understood what had happened. Just milliseconds later, the two teams roared at each other. A wild tussle developed before Berning's eyes.
Cursing quietly, Sieglinde stood up and stomped towards the men bandying blows, while people rushed in from all sides to bring the brawlers apart.
Tula, Soviet Union, June 25th, 1943
After two days of fierce and bitter fighting for the city, the forces of the Red Army, who were entrenched in the city center, were encircled from the north, west, and south. In the east, there was still a narrow land corridor leading to the rear echelon of the Soviets, but it was under constant fire from German batteries.
The soldiers of the Wehrmacht had advanced street by street, house by house, room by room in bloody, close-quarter combat. In man-to-man fighting, the soldiers of both sides had killed each other at close range, executing each other with bullets, rifle butts, bare hands, and teeth. But the advance of the Germans seemed to be unstoppable these days. The Red Army soldiers were pushed farther and farther into the inner city, where they were crammed together like cattle, trapped under a fire bell made of a thousand German barrels of all calibers. There were no more houses in Tula. Ruins was the appropriate term. Stones stacked on top of each other, walls blown out, and roofs shattered were all that the war had left of the once thriving city.
This afternoon, the Wehrmacht sounded the charge to storm the last Russian emplacements in this stony, leaden hell, covered in dust and blood. On the Soviet side, a wild mixture of tanks, AT-guns, infantry, cavalry, even pilots, doctors, partisans, and wounded clung to everything that could be used to extinguish lives. They awaited the German attack with fierce determination.
Engelmann and his men had not experienced the worst abominations of this struggle for Tula firsthand. Shielded behind centimeter-thick armor, they shot at buildings from a distance. Nevertheless, the nerves of the German tankers were also raw. Day and night the battle had raged; no rest, no sleep, no food had been granted to the soldiers. With faces encrusted with dried oil and dirt, chapped lips and swollen mucous membranes, the crew of Franzi II ignored all the sacrifices they made these days and concentrated as best they could on the one last fight ahead of them. The tiredness and exhaustion were written in their faces. With milky eyes and pale, expressionless – almost dead – visages, the tank men looked through their vision blocks at the debris that had once been Tula.
The sun stood glistening over the city and heated the grey walls to an unbearable temperature. The panzers of 12th Company plowed across a wide road onto the last bastion of the Tula defenders: the Cathedral of the Assumption on the grounds of the Tula Kremlin, a 16th century stronghold. Since the beginning of the battle of Tula, the German artillery had been busy shooting the Kremlin, ready to storm it. While Hausser's men pushed forward to the residential district east of the Kremlin, from which Russian weapons were still sounding after several days of drumfire, Panzer Regiment 2 had received orders to support the infantry's advance into the Kremlin.
Engelmann's panzer drove across a main road following Stollwerk’s tank, who had once again taken the lead. Behind Engelmann, the remains of the 12th Company pushed through the narrow street canyons of Tula. The other panzer companies approached the enemy emplacements from parallel roads in order to engage on a broad front.
Engelmann looked through his vision block. He had closed the lids of his hatch. The ruins of row houses flew past on the right and left, but the street canyon ended straight ahead. There a huge square emerged where the cathedral was located. The walls of the Kremlin no longer existed. Also the large, red brick five-dome
building, which had been used as an archive since the advent of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, was perforated like a coarse sponge. The towers, clad in black, rose into the sky like torn branches. But no matter how many explosive shells were pounding the building, no matter how often the old walls shook under the detonations of the impacts, it resisted destruction. The site around the cathedral had once been a beautiful city park now had turned into a Great War Western Front-like no-man's land. Bomb craters, some wide enough to swallow a truck, had broken up the soil. Where once old trees stood, only burst stumps protruded from the earth. A cloud of dust was spreading around the battlefield and made visibility worse; it was fed by every shell raining onto the battleground. The ubiquitous dust burned in the eyes of the soldiers and infiltrated their lungs, causing a ghastly cough.
Suddenly the German artillery fell silent. The last shells hailed down on the city center, tearing buildings apart. The drumming of the guns perfectly tuned into the advancement of the panzers and the infantry. Stollwerk’s tank was the first to storm out of the street canyon into the open square. Franzi II turned slightly to the right and accelerated to close up on Stollwerk. The panzers dashed forward together, while the other tanks of 12th Company joined the push to the right and left of their leader. They formed a steely front that threatened to overrun the enemy.
Everywhere, infantrymen swarmed. NCOs shooed their men out of the sheltering buildings into the open square, where they took cover behind the tanks platoon-wise, advancing in their slipstream. Far to the right, the Tigers of the Africans accessed the battlefield. The armored monsters pushed their way over the shattered earth, and even behind them further infantrymen were scurrying around like blowflies.
"Not so fast, Hans," Engelmann warned, "the boys behind us must still be able to come with us."
"Why? Can't the dogfaces make 20 an hour?" Münster grinned doggedly and didn't even seem to notice that his commander rolled his eyes. The behavior of the driver really started to annoy him. He ignored it for now, though.
Instead he pressed his eyes against the narrow vision block. He clearly recognized the Russian fire that was pelting toward them from all the holes and breaches of the cathedral and the smaller Epiphany Cathedral standing beside it. Tracer projectiles cut through the dusty fog, collided with the tanks, and were hurled away like glowing cigarette butts. Ludwig's coaxial machine gun fired in between. With short bursts of fire, he stroked the lowest, squared windows of the cathedral. The Germans forces shot at the Russian positions from all directions while storming the site. It was an incredible firestorm that hit the Red Army soldiers like an atrocious blizzard.
At that moment, the water-blue sky was overshadowed by an all-encompassing steely might. Huge wings and fuselages filled with thousands of kilos of bomb load blocked the view of the sun. Once again the metal birds of Air Fleet 6 did their best to level the residential district in the east, and to plow all Russian emplacements there that already had been hammered into the ground like nails by past air raids and artillery fire; the defenders squatting in the debris and dirt were buried alive once more. Soiled and dusted Red Army soldiers, each and every one of them at least slightly wounded, emerged from the rubble. The attack of German ground forces would follow on its heels.
An incredible crash came out of one of the big broken windows of the cathedral. An explosive shell exploded between two German panzers advancing fast. Splinters and sparks were spraying the tanks and the infantry behind them. A foot soldier shrieked and held his shoulder before going down.
"AT-gun!" Engelmann exclaimed and clung to his seat. "Second arch window from the right!"
"God!" moaned Nitz, clutching his machine gun. "Poor dogs don't stand a chance!"
But all Russian resistance seemed futile. Even before the regiment's panzers could have reacted, a full platoon from the Tiger battalion stopped and punched a salvo of explosive shells into the large arched windows. After that, the enemy AT-gun remained silent.
"We approach the cathedral up to two hundred, then the riflemen do their part," Stollwerk's voice resounded from the radio devices. "We then turn left and circuit those group of buildings up ahead. Watch out for enemy tanks! Air reconnaissance reports four T-34s behind the cathedral!"
Engelmann confirmed, then he ordered Nitz to switch to their internal board frequency.
"Hans, stay on Stollwerk!" he gasped into his throat microphone.
"As you wish, Reverend."
"And don't you fucking say that!" Apparently the message had hit home, because this time Münster refrained from any further comment. Instead, he threw himself into his steering levers and let Franzi II turn slightly to the left, just as Stollwerk's tank had done seconds before. The infantrymen, who had reached up to 200 meters to the cathedral by the tanks, raced now as if stung by an adder into the dying enemy fire and threw themselves into the foremost bomb craters. Meanwhile a whole company of Tiger panzers had taken up position on the square. After taking out two more hostile AT-guns, they pointed their muzzles at the two cathedrals. With a shattering roar, they sent the first explosive shells on their journey, thunderously digging their way into the walls and tearing large pieces out of the buildings.
A huge wall of dust arose, enveloping the enemy emplacements. But the Tigers needed no more targets – they just fired at the shadow of the cathedrals that could be seen through the dust. The next salvo of high-explosive shells swished into the wall of dust, triggering a hell of a noise behind it. Man-sized boulders of stone were thrown out of the dusty mist onto the square. In the meantime, the enemy fire nearly died. Occasionally, MG fire bursts still hit German infantrymen positions or panzers, but it got obvious that the Russians defenders were defeated here. Engelmann stretched his head against the lids of his cupola’s hatch and glanced through the vision block. Between dust and sparks, he just recognized how the bombers in the sky were dropping tiny pencils that glided into the city. Once again, every single stone in the neighboring residential district would be turned over.
You gotta give up now, Engelmann implored; not without recognition for the Russians who had held their positions in this hellfire for so long. But for the defenders of the two cathedrals, the last hour had come. Engelmann observed how platoon by platoon, the infantry disappeared into the dust. At the same time, the Tigers stopped firing. Communication between the different military branches was the trump card!
"Now these dogs get what they deserve," Münster cheered while accelerating his panzer further until he drove directly on Stollwerk's side. "Finally they get what they deserve!"
The tanks of 11th and 12th Company surrounded the fogged cathedral buildings, in which the Russian defenders now fought in a last twitch against German superiority.
In their push across the huge square, the panzers had to evade large bomb craters and shot vehicles several times. Everything else – fallen trees, rubble, corpses – was chopped up by the crawler tracks and punched into the ground. At some distance, the two advancing panzer companies were followed by the pitiful remains of the regiment. They secured the edges of the square to shield the battlefield.
11th and 12th Company had almost reached the backside of the cathedrals. Desperate Russian drivers in military trucks of US-American design tried to escape the German attack there by setting off in a northerly direction. Did they know that Hausser's men were already lurking there?
The two German panzer companies sent them iron greetings. An explosive shell tore a hole in the ground next to a truck speeding away. The energy set free by the explosion overthrew the vehicle. It slid through the dirt on its side for some meters before it finally came to a halt. Another truck driver seemed to lose his nerve. He spun the steering wheel hastily and ended up straight in a bomb crater, where the truck's foreside dug into the ground, while the rear axle hung in the air and the wheels still rotated.
"HE, Siggi!" Engelmann yelled. "Theo, we'll get that jalopy in the crater too. Who knows what he's loaded with!"
Jahnke loaded th
e main gun while Ludwig aligned the barrel. But one of 11th Company's panzers was faster, turning the stuck car into tiny pieces of scrap that whirled around.
"Damn soldiers of fortune," Engelmann grinned, but then things suddenly got serious. The outlines of three enemy tanks pealed out of the wall of dust.
"Nitz, radio to all! Three T-34s at three o'clock! We'll take the left one."
"I'm already on it," Ludwig exclaimed with clenched teeth. He aimed and fired. The projectile hit right between the hull and the turret, where it burst and morphed into a fabric of flame whose tongues of fire played around the tank like strands of hair on a pretty girl's face. After a few seconds the fire was gone, but the tank was still there – fully functional.
"Heh?" Engelmann groaned in wonder, because the T-34 was less than 400 meters away.
"Lieutenant!" Jahnke creaked. "We were still loaded with HE." But the tank loader already pushed an AP shell into the loading device and let the breech snap shut.
"Loaded!" he reported. At the same time, the T-34s and the many German tanks fired at each other. After the short exchange of blows, two German panzers were on fire, while a Russian tank's turret flew out of the rotating assembly. Another T-34 had been hit by three projectiles at once, which cracked its right track. Metal fragments whirled in all directions. Franzi II also shot another shell, but missed. The projectile disappeared somewhere in the still-growing dust wall.
Suddenly the breath of the German tankers faltered, for more and more shadows of T-34s became visible in the dust wall before breaking out of it into the open. Engelmann counted over twenty enemy tanks at once ... and more kept coming. One by one, they were digging their way out of the dust.
"They didn't mean four tanks... they meant four companies," Engelmann remarked bitterly.
"Close in! We're getting Ivan involved in close combat," Stollwerk commanded via radio. Engelmann was aware that the captain demanded an outrageous sacrifice from his company by that, but the alternative would have been to retreat. Then probably just as many German tanks would have been destroyed without inflicting losses on the enemy. The two tank fronts clashed into each other. Barrels cracked, steel burst, tanks were torn apart. At short distance, even the German Panzer IIIs landed some effective hits, but from the overpowering T-34, every shot was deadly. German tanks dropped like flies. Tankers bailed out of their devastated vehicles, floundering across the battlefield.