I climbed up onto the hull, and took in the scene of our victory. All along the sloping ground beyond the bunkers, our Tigers were climbing to the ridge at the top, taking up their commanding fire position that would guard the main thrust of our Kampfgruppe battle group through the centre of the Soviet lines, ten kilometres to the south.
That was the plan, and the plan was working so far.
I checked our track links and dish wheels, finding them in good order, although the links would need tightening and the rear idler wheels were bleeding lubricant. The tracks were coated in bits of human debris from our clash with the Red infantry before the ditch – hair, boots, fingers and long, bloody shreds of flesh. Cleaning this stuff out was a miserable job that we usually allocated to prisoners.
Indeed, huddled against a bunker nearby was a sad group of ten live Russians whose surrender we had accepted, as they appeared to be part of a radio operating team. A radio team was a good catch, and they might hold useful intelligence; but, like all prisoners, they would be put to work cleaning our track links and doing whatever lifting and carrying we needed, before they were taken away for processing.
One of these prisoners in particular attracted our men’s attention. She was a young woman, apparently some kind of junior radio officer, that we wanted to prioritise for interrogation because of her rank and her potential knowledge. She stood there scowling, with her arms folded across the front of her male uniform, her hair in coppery coils around her neck.
Behind us, the anti-tank ditch was properly bridged now: a Sturmpioner engineers unit had come up with a steel gantry bridge on a Panzer IV chassis, and slung it across the chasm, away from the wrecked causeway and the crushed T34 that we had used as an emergency filler. Our supporting Panzergrenadier infantry had caught up with us, and were crossing the steel bridge in their Hanomag half-tracked vehicles, then fanning out across the land behind the Tigers, so that we were a true little occupying army up here on the Russian heights.
Some of the Hanomag troops yelled at me as their half-track paused nearby.
‘Who dumped the Ivan in the ditch, Faust?’
‘I did it myself.’
‘Scheisse! You learned a lot when your daddy was driving that tram, didn’t you?’
I gave them a cheerful underarm salute, and they returned it as their vehicle drove on up the ridge. But yes, I thought, looking at a mangled Russian belt buckle wedged in my front drive wheel. I learned a lot from my daddy driving that tram, when I was sitting on his knee and hearing stories of the first war –
‘Wake up, man!’ Helmann’s voice was loud in my ear. ‘You drove well today. Don’t go to sleep on me now.’
‘Sir.’
I turned to look at Helmann.
Six foot three, shaven headed, with his Oberleutnant’s cap, tailored in Berlin, pulled at a handsome angle over one eye. The Iron Cross on his neck, the breadth of his chest under his field-black panzer uniform, the MP 40 held over one shoulder. Also the faint tang of cognac, and the shadows under his grey, feline eyes.
‘Our unit has fought superbly so far today, Faust,’ he said. ‘You yourself set an excellent example of determination.’
‘Sir.’
I never heard him say such things before. Maybe it was his temporary promotion that made him so talkative, the Boss of our brigade being still stranded somewhere back on the steppe.
As if he read my thoughts, Helmann added,
‘The Boss will hear about this. He’ll be with us very soon.’
‘Sir. I expect one of the Hanomags will bring up him and his crew.’
‘Yes, yes.’
Helmann’s grey eyes studied the plain behind our panzer, where the T34 defenders were still burning or lying in the mud, and our knocked-out Tigers were already being worked on by recovery teams, desperate to get the beasts hauled away for transport back to the salvage depots in the west.
‘Here is the last Hanomag now,’ Helmann said. ‘I’m sure this is the Boss now.’
‘Sir.’
We watched the final Hanomag approach slowly, picking its way through the craters and past the Russian fox holes. Our gunner and loader climbed down from the panzer, where they had been dumping out the spent shell cases and loading fresh stocks of 88mm and MG from a munitions tractor that accompanied the Hanomags.
Wilf, our gunner, was a wry, taciturn marksman who liked to live in the panzer. His mop of fair hair was shaved at the top to prevent it getting into his eyes. He spoke some of the Russian language, and he privately assured us that Russian women were possessed of wondrous appetites.
Stang, our 88mm gun loader and the fifth man of our crew, had suffered a head injury at Kharkov the year before; he rarely spoke except to acknowledge orders, but he was still the fastest 88mm breech man in the unit.
Up in our Tiger, my big, ugly comrade Kurt stood halfway out of his hatch, his radio headset still on – also watching the Hanomag approach.
The half-track came over the girder span, and clattered onto the mud of the ridge, steering around the debris and concrete that lay everywhere. It creaked to a halt beside us, and its commander, a young Captain, jumped down from the open hull, saluting Helmann.
‘We have brought the Boss, Herr Ober,’ the man said, in a cold voice.
‘Yes, where is he? In the back? Is he ok?’
The Captain went around to the Hanomag’s rear double doors, and hauled them open. We looked inside.
The Boss’s Tiger crew were there – all of them – lying on the steel floor on the mud and ice. The Boss was among them. Like each of the others, he had a bullet wound in the forehead. It had blown the back of his skull away, and soaked his silver-grey hair with blood and brain matter. I noticed that his Iron Cross was missing.
‘The Ivans must have caught them, Herr Ober,’ the Captain said. ‘Maybe the Reds were in a concealed slit trench. You see? They were executed, one after the other.’
Yes, it was obviously an execution. The men had been lined up and shot, one by one – that was evident. The Iron Cross had been taken as a souvenir. What other explanation was there?
I turned away from the sight, but I saw Helmann still examining the bodies, nodding to himself. Then he slammed the vehicle doors shut with a crash, and walked away, to where the gang of Russian radio team prisoners were huddled against the wall of the ruined bunker. Helmann took his MP40 quite casually off his shoulder, primed it, and shot five of the Russian prisoners, in the chest, one after the other.
The five survivors began to yell and plead for mercy in garbled voices. Only the coppery-haired woman soldier, whom Helmann had spared, remained silent, staring at the slumped corpses.
Helmann shouldered his weapon again, and lit a cigarette, studying the dead Russians in the way he had just studied the bodies of his dead comrades. Then he turned away and said to Wilf,
‘Tell them to clean the tracks of my Panzer. I want all the scheisse off, and all the track links to be polished. Tell them in Russian to do that now.’
‘Jawohl, Herr Ober.’
*
We knew something was wrong when we drove the Tiger up to the top of the ridge and looked down into the plain to the south. I had a pair of civilian binoculars that I always kept handy, and I used them to scan the low-lying land, feeling like a proper panzer chief.
‘Well?’ Kurt asked, both of us with our heads up out of our hatches, and the thick barrel of the 88mm over our heads against the freezing Russian sky. It was after midday, but the red sun still gave no heat. ‘Where’s the Kampfgruppe?’
I gave him the binoculars.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he muttered. ‘There’s not a scheisse thing down there.’
‘Maybe they’re late?’ I offered.
‘Late?’ he said. ‘Well, some things can be late. Trams can be late, Faust – you know that. Easter is late some years. I had a pretty girlfriend once, who said she was two months late, when she wanted a ring on her finger. But a whole Kamfgruppe? Late?’
> ‘Then why did we do all this?’ I said. ‘Why did we fight our way up here, and lose those men, and shoot all those scheisse Russians to bits?’
All along the ridge, on this piece of prime Soviet real estate bought so dearly, the other fifteen surviving Tiger crews, plus ten Hanomags full of Panzergrenadiers, were no doubt asking each other the same question – maybe not with my fine turn of phrase, though.
I could hear Helmann, still acting commander of the unit, having staccato discussions over the inefficient radio link with the Divisional commanders.
‘Wass?’ he was saying. ‘When? How soon? How far? How many?’
Kurt and I exchanged a look.
Three minutes later, our newly-cleaned track links were thick with Soviet mud, as we began to move, taking our prisoners with us in the Hanomags. This time, though, we weren’t advancing – we were retreating, going back the way we came.
*
When I was a kid, in the 1930’s, I used to listen to my dad, when he came back from driving the tram, at the kitchen table in the little apartment on Hofsee Strasse, by the railway line. He would tell me stories about armies in victory and retreat – especially retreat.
Napoleon in Russia, the damned British in South Africa and Ireland, and his own Kaiser Wilhelm army marching out of France in 1919 with its rifles and artillery intact. I had the impression back then, in our kitchen, that a retreat was a slow, orderly kind of affair – with lots of lining up and queuing, and ‘After you, Mein Herr!’ ‘No, after you, sir, I insist!’ along the way.
In the Wehrmacht, aged twenty, I learned that retreating in Russia in 1943 was not like that. Retreating in Russia was pretty much the same as advancing in Russia. It was at the same speed, it was just as messy, and there were the same number of Reds after your neck and your arse in its black Panzer trousers. The main difference was that the Reds were firing from behind you, not in front of you; and therefore you couldn’t look at them and drive at the same time.
I couldn’t tell my dad about this, of course, because the Allied bombers flattened our apartment in Hofsee Strasse in 1942, and killed my parents and my sister.
‘Faust, what is wrong with you?’
I had just made the basic mistake of driving too close to a bomb crater, and the earth had begun to give way under the right hand tracks, forcing me to swerve left into a pile of debris from some old Red tank. The bits of Russian steel clattered around in our tracks, each one, I knew, a potential link-breaker that could leave us stranded until nightfall.
I felt Helmann’s boot in my back, which I deserved.
‘Keep it straight, man. Don’t let me down.’
‘Sir.’
‘Keep it good and straight,’ Kurt yelled over the bulkhead. ‘Like a Munich tram.’
‘Damn you, Kurt,’ I muttered.
I kept it straight, though, at our column’s steady 20kph, the same speed as the attack, each minute putting more ground between us and the counter-attacking Reds who were behind us. We were driving back across the steppe the way we had come, with the Russian winter sun declining in the west in front of us.
The fact was that we had to get back a long, long way beyond our initial assembly areas by the time that Soviet sun went down, or we were in all kinds of scheisse.
The fact was that the Kampfgruppe had failed in its mission to the south. Instead of us flanking and standing guard over their central assault, we were now isolated out on the steppe, alone in Ivan’s own backyard, with, according to Helmann’s briefing earlier . . .
‘A regiment of Soviet armour, the new type, the JS tank. They’re advancing on us from the north-west, and there’s another pincer to the south east. Our Kampfgruppe are completely bogged down by PAK and minefields – our intelligence was wrong. Our objective now is to get back to the western river, to join up with the Kampfgruppe there, and hold the river bank on the eastern side against these Reds. If they get across the river, they’ll swarm into the western plain. You know what that means.’
We knew.
The western plain had everything our army relied on: our salvage and repair depots, our hospitals, our logistics stations, our refitting points, our ammunition stocks, the railheads from the west, the airfields we needed. Above all, our precious, life-giving gasoline, in its underground, steel-lined chambers. If the Reds overran us on that western plateau . . . no gas, no ammunition, no supplies. The very borders of the Reich itself would be exposed to the Russian attack – an unimaginable concept. And our little column would turn into fifteen Tiger-shaped coffins, plus ten Hanomag-shaped hearses, deep inside a Soviet graveyard.
‘It goes wrong sometimes,’ Kurt yelled. ‘Like love.’
‘What do you know about love?’
‘Plenty, my friend, plenty. Every time I get my pay.’
We were both head-up out of the hull hatches, sitting on our seat risers, our vehicle being in the centre of our column of armour. There were five Tigers at the front, then the ten Hanomags and their Panzergrenadiers, including the Soviet prisoners that we wanted to take back. Bringing up the rear were the final ten Tigers. We were the first of these, with the Hanomags in front of us. We were no longer in an arrowhead – but in a long, straight line of overheating machines, all running low on fuel.
Overhead, in the afternoon sky, I saw a pair of our beautiful Focke–Wulf fighters streak over us at about 500 metres altitude, also heading west, the black and white Reich crosses under their wings very clear in the light. One of them was trailing white smoke. Just as they passed over, another two aircraft swooped over us, with blue undersides – and the red star of Bolshevism clear on their wings. From my vision block, I saw them chase our FWs across the plain, and then, after barely half a minute, I saw a bright orange fire in the sky, and many puffs of white as explosions took place.
In a few seconds, the aerial combat above us became even clearer.
Our column left the open grasslands and regained the road leading out of the steppe – not a road in our proper German sense, but a flattened track with the luxury of stone chippings and occasional drainage ditches. As we mounted this roadway, I saw a shadow passing over our Tiger, a cross-shaped dark form. I glanced up, and saw a Stuka dive bomber flying very low, weaving from side to side and spitting out clouds of black fumes from its cowling. I saw that it was one of the new version Stukas – not a dive-bomber, but a tank-killer, with long cannon under its wings that could wreak havoc, so it was said, with the engine decks of any Russian armour.
This crooked-winged plane, with its wheel spats sticking down like claws, swooped across our column, lifted up, floated in the air a moment, with its engine pouring smoke – and then stalled and went down in a long belly-dive into the steppe. I saw it land away from the road, on our left, and I watched as broken bits of the tailplane and wings flew out behind it. The entire propeller came spinning into our roadway, passing right in front of me, and crashed off to the other side.
I didn’t stop, but the Hanomag in front of us did, and I had to swerve to avoid the verdamm thing. I could see down into its open interior, and I glimpsed the Russian prisoners huddled at the rear, faced by scowling Panzergrenadiers training guns on them. As the Hanomag slowed sharply, a gun went off – and one of the prisoners bucked and sprawled. I saw the Hanomag’s rear doors open briefly – and the dead prisoner was thrown out onto the road. I guess the Tiger behind me ran him over – but by that point I was steering past the Hanomag off the road, and ploughing along the frozen Russian soil, while on my left the Stuka came to a rest and started to burn.
‘We are not a transport for the Luftwaffe,’ I heard Helmann say. ‘But these pilots may have useful information. Faust, halt a moment.’
‘Sir.’
I halted the Tiger.
To our left, out of the Stuka’s smoke, I saw a man staggering towards us: an airman still in his flying helmet and blue overalls, with his arm around a wounded comrade who was stumbling and dragging his feet, evidently in the last stages of consciousness. B
ehind them, the Stuka’s cannon rounds exploded in spirals of white sparks, and the glass canopy blew open in the gasoline fire.
The Stuka airman saw our vehicle waiting for him, and a Tiger must have looked like a vision of rescue, because he dropped his unconscious comrade and ran to us. Standing at the roadside, he saluted and shouted up at Helmann in the cupola,
‘Take me on board, comrades. The Reds are ten kilometres behind you here.’
‘Come up here and brief me on the situation,’ Helmann shouted. ‘What about your friend there?’
‘He is dead, Herr Ober.’
Ten seconds after that, we were rolling again, and the pilot was crammed into the turret cage with Helmann, Wilf the gunner, and Stang the breech-man, telling our commander what he knew of the Red advance. I went down into the hull compartment and closed the hatch, so that I could listen in while driving.
‘There are fifty of those new Josef Stalin tanks behind us,’ the Luftwaffe man was saying with excitement. ‘Those big monsters are like solid iron. Our Stuka cannons can damage them in the engine grilles, but on the turrets we hardly make a dent on them. I can tell you, I shot them up until I had no cannon shells left.’
‘You had cannon shells left when you crashed just now,’ Helmann said. ‘I saw them exploding. But what direction are the Reds going, and what forces do they have with them?’
‘They are heading for the western river, Herr Oberleutnant. Straight for the river. They’re going at speed, too. They’ll cross this road in half an hour, I’d say. They have mobile artillery, and infantry in trucks, about fifty trucks of them. I may have had some ammunition left,’ he added. ‘But you see, it does so little against those Stalins.’
‘Which is your airbase?’
‘Plovenka, to the west of the river. If that is overrun by these Ivan tanks, there’ll be no air cover for a hundred kilometre radius.’
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 3
