Wheels of Terror

by Sven Hassel

  Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year’s military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain. His world war books have sold over 53 million copies worldwide.

  Bauer, the black marketeer – Pluto, the huge docker who had stolen a truckload of flour – Möller, who held unfashionable religious convictions – Porta, who had laughed too loud – Stege, the student who had taken part in demonstrations – I, who had deserted—

  These were the men of the 27th Panzer Regiment, convicts stripped of honour, counting their existence in hours and lusting and desecrating like half-crazed animals.

  With everything forgotten but the struggle for personal survival, they lived in a maniacal world in which the scream of bullets, the agonised cries of the dying and the frenzied animal couplings with women prisoners were the only realities.

  By the same author

  Legion of the Damned

  Monte Cassino

  SS General

  Comrades of War

  Liquidate Paris

  Blitzfreeze

  Reign of Hell

  Translated by I. O’Hanlon

  With hell inside you it can be fine

  To live a jester under God’s spell,

  Yet open heaven’s gates divine

  With the heavy keys of your private hell.

  This book is dedicated to the three greatest jesters of the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment: Obergefreiter Joseph Porta, ‘Tiny’ and the ‘Little Legionnaire’.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Copyright

  1

  The air-raid screams, whistles, thunders. Fire falls from the sky. Mothers cry to God and throw themselves over their children to protect them from the rain of fire falling on the asphalt.

  Soldiers, trained in murder and hate, soldiers carrying their arms, are to be the people’s protectors.

  When the enemy bombers are silent, the rifles of these protectors speak.

  Ordinary decent people, whose last energy has burnt away in panic-stricken terror, are being murdered by the soldiers of their own country.

  What is the meaning of it all?

  Dictatorship, my friend.

  Nox Diaboli

  The barracks were silent and dark, wrapped in the dark velvet of autumn. Only the sharp heel-taps of the sentries’ hob-nailed boots could be heard as they walked their tedious watch on the cemented path in front of the gates and along the sides of the barrack buildings.

  In Room 27 we sat and played cards, Skat, of course.

  ‘Twenty-four,’ Stege called.

  ‘You bloody whore,’ Porta rhymed, grinning ferociously. ‘That’s where I came in.’

  ‘Twenty-nine,’ Möller bid quietly.

  ‘Sod you, you Schleswig spudpeeler,’ Porta said.

  ‘Forty,’ came calmly from The Old Un. ‘Who can beat that? Laughing on the other side of your face now, eh, Skinny?’

  ‘Don’t be too bloody sure. Even playing with sharpers like you, you old …’ Porta leered at The Old Un. ‘I’ll see you off. Forty-six!’

  Bauer started to laugh loudly:

  ‘I’ll tell you something, old Porta. Here’s forty-eight, and if you can beat that—’

  ‘Not too much talk, my lamb. Quite a few of you died from that. But if you want to play with experienced people, this is how it is done.’ Porta looked very smug. ‘Forty-nine!’

  At that moment loud whistling came from the corridors:

  ‘Alert, alert, air-raid warning!’

  And then the sirens cut in with their rising and falling banshee wails. Bursting with malice and cursing fluently, Porta flung down his cards.

  ‘To hell with these bloody Tommies – coming and mucking up the best hand I’ve had for years!’

  To a recruit, who stood looking confused and fumbling with his gear, he roared:

  ‘Alert, my pretty, air-raid warning! Down to the shelters with you, double-quick, off!’

  The recruits stood open-mouthed listening to his Berliner guttersnipe bellowings.

  ‘Is it really a raid?’ asked one of the recruits nervously.

  ‘Of course it’s a bloody raid. You don’t imagine the Tommies have come to invite us to a ball at Buckingham Palace, do you? And that’s not the worst of it! Now my lovely game of Skat goes to hell! Just to think what a mess a damned war can make of quiet, honest people’s lives …’

  Wild confusion had broken out. Everyone was tumbling round each other. Lockers were torn open. Heavy boots thundered through the long corridors of the vast block of barracks and down the stairs to the assembly points. Those who had not yet properly learned how to cope with their new hobnailed boots fell flat on the slippery tiled floors. Those who came behind waded over the novices, who had all more or less gone wild with panic when they heard the sirens. Most of them had enough experience to know that in a moment the bombs would come screaming through the pitch-black night.

  ‘Number four platoon – over here.’ The Old Un’s quiet voice sounded curiously penetrating through the dark so dense it could nearly be cut. In the sky we could hear the heavy bombers winging towards their target. And now the flak began to bark hollowly from here and there about the city. Suddenly a light flared, a sharp white light which hung in the sky like a beautifully lit Christmas tree. The first target-light. In a minute the bombs would be drumming down to earth.

  ‘Number three to the shelters,’ sounded RSM Edel’s deep bass voice.

  At once the company’s two hundred men split up and rushed in all directions to slit-trenches or even just heaps of soil. We soldiers were afraid of what were called air-raid shelters. We preferred the open trenches to the cellars, which we regarded as rat-traps.

  And then hell loosed itself. Round us the enormous explosions shrieked and thundered. The bombs fell like a blanket over the city. In a moment everything was lit by the blood-red light from the great sea of flames. Crouching in our trenches, it looked as though the whole world was disintegrating in front of our eyes.

  For miles around, the explosive and incendiary bombs illumined the condemned city. No words could ever describe that horror. The phosphorus of the incendiaries spurted like fountains in the air and spread an inferno. Asphalt, stone, people, trees, even glass went up in flames. Then the high explosives followed, spreading the inferno even wider. The fire was not the white fire of a furnace but red, like blood.

  New, blinding Christmas trees appeared in the sky, giving the signal to attack. Bombs and air-torpedoes shrieked down on the city. Like an animal marked for slaughter it lay there, and like lice people searched for wrinkles and crannies to hide in. They were finished, torn to shreds, suffocated, burned, broken, minced. Yet many, just for a momen
t, made desperate attempts to save their lives. The lives to which they clung despite war, hunger, loss and political terror.

  The Firling Flak at the barracks stuttered and barked against the invisible bombers. Orders had demanded that it should be fired. Fine! The gunners fired, but one thing we knew: not one of the great bombers would be damaged by the ridiculous Firling Flak.

  Somewhere someone cried so loudly that the voice penetrated the din. The hysterical and sobbing voice cried for the ambulance squad. Two bombs had hit a single barracks-block.

  ‘God help us,’ murmured Pluto who lay on his back in the slit-trench with his steel helmet pushed over his forehead. ‘I only hope they’ve hit some of the Nazi high brass down there.’

  ‘Funny how a city can burn,’ added Möller as he lifted himself up and looked out towards the glowing sea of fire. ‘What is it that burns so?’

  ‘Fat women, thin women, beer-blown men, thin men, bad children, nice children, beautiful girls, everything mixed up,’ said Stege and wiped the sweat off his brow.

  ‘Well, well, children, you’ll soon find out – when we go down and help with the clearing up,’ The Old Un said evenly, and lit his old pipe with its period-piece lid. ‘I’d rather see something else. I don’t like seeing half or whole-charred children.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ said Stege. ‘There’s going to be no difference between us and a mob of slaughterhouse workers when we get going down there.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we are?’ Porta asked, laughing evilly. ‘What is this bloody army we have the honour of belonging to, but just a huge butchery? Still, never mind. At least we’ll have a trade to fall back on, eh?’

  He stood up and bowed sardonically to the whole gang of us as we lay there with our backs pressed against the sides of the trench:

  ‘Joseph Porta, Corporal by the grace of God, butcher in Adolf’s army, habitual criminal and death candidate, corpse-carrier and incendiary! Your servant, gentlemen!’

  At that moment a new Christmas tree flamed up near us, and he dropped quickly back into the trench.

  He added, sighing: ‘Another party is off to hell. Amen!’

  For three solid hours, without a minute’s peace, the explosives drummed down from the dark velvet sky. The phosphorus containers poured on the streets and houses in close-knit showers, in one impenetrable hailstorm of death and destruction.

  The flak had long since been silenced. Our night fighters were up there, but the big bombers were not bothered by their smaller brothers-in-hell. The huge steam-roller of fire crushed the city from north to south, from east to west. The railway station was a roaring ruin of flames with red-hot carriages and engines in one molten heap, as if it had been ground by a giant amusing himself. Hospitals and nursing-homes collapsed in a holocaust of mortar and fire. Here the many beds provided excellent opportunities for the phosphorus to sport. Most of the patients were in the cellars, but there were many left in the wards for the flames to devour. Screaming, amputated cases struggled to get up and away from the flames which licked hot and hungry through doors and windows. The long corridors provided chimneys with a splendid draught. Fireproof walls burst like glass under the devastating pressure of explosives. People got up, only to fall gasping to the ground, suffocated by the heat. The stench of singed flesh and fat floated across to us in our trenches. Between the detonations the last half-strangled screams reached us.

  ‘Children, children,’ gasped The Old Un, ‘this is bad, this is. Any left alive will be round the bend after this bloody lot. Give me the front-line any time. There women and children don’t get roasted and skinned. The damned swine who invented air-raids should have a taste of this.’

  ‘We’ll burn the fat off Hermann’s backside when we have our revolution,’ hissed Porta. ‘Where’s the fat slug now, I wonder?’

  At last it looked like ending. Piercing whistles and words of command rang out through the barracks, which were still illuminated by the ocean of flames. In single file we doubled to our stations.

  Porta leaped wildly into a Krupp diesel lorry. The engine whined, and without waiting for orders he swung the huge vehicle out and roared off. We clung on as best we could. A nineteen-year-old lieutenant shouted something, and ran at the roaring vehicle. A couple of big hands heaved him in.

  ‘Who in hell’s name is driving this!’ he gasped, but nobody answered him. We had enough to do trying to hang on to the madly bucking truck which Porta with a deft hand steered between the deep craters in the road. We thundered through the burning streets where tramcars and other vehicles lay broken between mortar rubble and fallen lamp-posts. But Porta didn’t take a fraction off his speed. At one point, he swung in on clear pavement, knocking down small trees like matchsticks. But near Erichsstrasse we had to stop. A couple of air-torpedoes had struck, and a building lay like a wall across the street. Even a bulldozer would have had to call a halt.

  We leaped off the truck and with pickaxes, axes and shovels, worked our way through the rubble. Lieutenant Harder tried his best to gather us under his command, but nobody paid any attention. The Old Un took charge. Shrugging his shoulders, the young officer grabbed a pickaxe and followed the file behind. The Old Un, the experienced frontline soldier. Like all of us, he had changed his weapons for a tool which we handled with as much adroitness as when we used flame-throwers and machine-pistols in battle: the entrenching-spade.

  Through the raw, nauseating smoke people bandaged with dirty rags came towards us. Grossly swollen burns spoke their own clear language. Here were women, children, men, old and young, whose faces terror had turned to stone. Madness shone out of their eyes. Most of them had had their hair singed off, so one could barely distinguish one sex from the other. Many had wrapped themselves in wet sacks and rags as a protection against the flames. One woman in her madness shouted at us:

  ‘Haven’t you had enough! Haven’t you dragged out this war long enough! My children are burnt to death. My husband is lost. May you burn, too, you damned soldiers!’

  An old man took her by the shoulder and drew her away:

  ‘Now, now Helga, take it easy. You might make things even worse for us, you know …’

  She tore herself loose and leaped at Pluto with fingers spread like a tiger’s claws, but the big docker shook her off as if she had been a small child. She banged her head against the hot asphalt, burst into uncontrolled screams. She and the old man were lost to us as we worked our way forward to the gigantic cliff of ruins. Surrounded by flames it towered in front of us.

  A policeman without his helmet and with his uniform nearly burned away stopped us and stammered:

  ‘The Children’s Home, the Children’s Home, the Children’s Home …’

  ‘What are you drooling about?’ The Old Un snarled as the policeman dragged at him and kept on stuttering:

  ‘The Children’s Home, the Children’s Home!’

  Quickly Porta stepped forward and slammed his iron fist two or three times in the policeman’s face. This treatment had often produced striking results at the front when we had used it on somebody with shell-shock. It also helped a little now. With eyes nearly popping out of his head with terror the policeman gabbled a sort of explanation, words tumbling out.

  ‘Save the children! They’re trapped inside. The whole lot is going up like matchwood!’

  ‘Stuff it, you Schupo swine!’ bellowed Porta grabbing the man by the shoulders and shaking him like a mat. ‘Get your fat copper’s carcase moving to the Children’s Home and bloody quick! In front of us now – los mensch! What are you waiting for? I’m no captain – just Corporal Joseph Porta by the grace of God – but I expect crap like you to take my orders!’

  The policeman, who looked as if he wanted to run for it, started to dart about confusedly, but Lieutenant Harder clutched him: ‘Didn’t you hear? Get going! Show us the way, and don’t dawdle or you’ll be shot!’

  Simultaneously he swung his Mauser under the nose of the half-crazed policeman. His lips were trembling viol
ently and his cheeks were streaked with tears. Normally, as an old man he would have been pensioned off but for the war.

  Pluto, his giant’s body towering over him, gave him a brutal shove and growled: ‘Shut up and march, Grandad.’

  The policeman, half-running, staggered along in front through collapsed shells of streets, where flames danced heavenwards. Women, children and men lay pressed fast to the ground. Some were dead, others had been struck dumb, and the cries of some curdled our blood.

  Where a few hours before there had been a street corner, a little boy came running to us, shouting and dribbling in his fright. ‘They are all trapped in the cellar. Help me get Mummy and Daddy out! He’s a soldier like you. He was just home on leave. Lieschen has lost her arm. Henrik has burned up.’

  We stopped for a moment. Möller petted the boy’s head: ‘We’ll soon be back!’

  We had reached a mountain of fallen rubble. It was impossible for us to go on. As we turned to ask the policeman to lead us another way there were enormous explosions close by. Like lightning we dived for shelter. Experience of the front line helps.

  ‘What the hell, is Tommy back again?’ hissed Porta.

  Still more metallic thunderclaps, missiles, stones and earth showered over us. When fragments hit our steel helmets they rang with a curious high-pitched scream. But the new onslaught could do little more than interrupt us. Soon it ceased.

  ‘They’re dropping them blind now,’ said The Old Un briefly and stood up.

  We pressed on towards our target, the policeman in front. He led us through a cellar. We smashed holes in the wall with our pickaxes to reach what looked like the remains of a big garden. Its trees had toppled and burnt and layers of rubble and twisted iron, the remnants of a building, were still burning furiously.

  The policeman pointed and muttered:

  ‘The children are underneath that lot …’

  ‘God, what a pasting it’s got,’ Stege said. ‘And what a hell of a stink! They must have had phosphor-bombs on top of the incendiaries.’