‘Do you want me to translate that, Herr Ober?’
‘No. Just ask her if she has friends in the Red Army.’
A complex translation followed.
‘She says she does not understand the question, sir.’
I could see the woman’s feet on the platform of the cage above me. One of her ankles was trembling. The Luftwaffe man opposite me noticed that too, and raised an eyebrow.
‘Ask her,’ Helmann instructed, ‘if she knows important people, officers, who might want to protect her and her radio team, and why they might want to do this this.’
‘She says she knows no important officers, and she is a basic radio clerk.’
Helmann slapped the woman in the face.
The sound echoed around inside the panzer’s bare metal surfaces, and the woman’s stifled cry echoed slightly too. The pilot looked at me with a grin, and I hated him from then on.
‘Tell her,’ Helmann said, ‘that we are too busy to get the truth from her right now. But if she has any important knowledge, she is being very foolish. Our colleagues in the intelligence services will interrogate her when we hand her over to them, and they are not gentlemen like us. We are in a hurry, but they will take their time with her. Assure her of this.’
The hesitant translation took some time.
‘She says she is a radio clerk, from a basic radio team, and she has not eaten.’
‘Enough. Put her in the Hanomag, with a double guard. Two armed men, to watch her at all times. Then at first light – Panzer Marsch.’
I took the woman back to the Hanomag. She was breathing sharply, and there was blood on her chin from where Helmann hit her. She stopped in the darkness to wipe it, talking to herself in Russian, breathlessly. Her hair came loose, and I saw that even in the dim moonlight it was long and thick, in coils over her shoulders. I could smell the clean, female scent of her hair, a scent which I had long forgotten.
On an impulse, I gave her my remaining half tin of army meat and my fork. She took it and ate quickly, devouring it. I gave her a piece of sugar from my pocket, and a drink of water from my flask, and she gulped at that.
She said something to me in Russian, which I didn’t understand.
I took her back to the Hanomags.
The wounded were sleeping through their morphine in their allotted vehicle, the open roof being covered over with a tarpaulin on which were laid branches and snow, so that the compartment was at least roughly sealed against the weather. Inside, a small kerosene stove was burning with a steady heat. The two nurses were nowhere to be seen there.
The adjacent Hanomag, however, looked very welcoming. The troops had spread a tarpaulin over this one too, and another small stove was burning inside. The nurses were holding court in there, entertaining various Panzergrenadiers and tank crew with a lot of friendly conversation.
I took two of these infantry men aside and relayed Helmann’s orders about putting a double guard on the Russian woman. They took the Russian to another Hanomag, which was covered over in the same way but not heated, and they put her inside this vehicle. I got the men to light a stove for her, and she smiled in gratitude. She curled up on the bench and put her hands over her head. The two men stood guard over her, casting impatient glances over at the nurses’ Hanomag.
Outside that one, a queue was forming.
*
Our Tiger was warm inside – being no more than one or two degrees below freezing. We had a ceramic cylinder heater which was warmed from the engine while it was running, and then radiated heat for an hour or so while the engine was still. We were lucky in this respect. We called the ground troops the icicle soldiers, because of the frozen snot and tears that we often saw projecting from their faces. On the other hand, when our ceramic cylinder eventually went cold, we were stuck and unable to move our limbs in the freezing panzer, while the infantry could at least light their kerosene stoves and move their feet.
I didn’t sleep, but I imagined a few sweet things. I imagined being around the kitchen table at home, before the war started, with the oven glowing, and my mother at the radio, tuning the dial. Before the war, she loved to hear the different languages that the wireless picked up, the Italian and French and Danish.
‘So many people in the world,’ she would say in admiration. ‘Can you hear them? So many people.’
I shook my head, coming back to reality. I wiped down my vision block and checked the tension in the transmission gear selector. It was running loose.
Kurt came back into the panzer some time later, through his hatch, and chuckled to himself as he closed it.
‘Ah, but those nurses are experts at treating a male patient,’ he said. ‘The brunette one cured me in no time at all.’
‘Cured you of what?’
‘My needs,’ he yawned in a cloud of vapour, and settled back in his seat. ‘She gave me the old Berlin handshake. I paid with a piece of sugar, so we were both happy.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t pay with a piece of sausage.’
He laughed, and in the dim light I saw him stroking the flank of his machine gun.
‘The other lads paid with sausage, and with cigarettes, and dried apple, brandy, and everything a woman could wish for,’ he said. ‘My God, but those nurses ate and drank well tonight. They will sleep like true angels.’
It was quiet in the hull, with just the sound of our breathing.
‘By the way – about those two nurses,’ Kurt said in a sleepy way. ‘They have a Walther pistol with them. They say it’s in case the Red soldiers capture them. They’d rather kill themselves with a bullet in the head than be violated by the Reds. They showed me the gun – they know how to use it, and they mean it, too.’ He yawned. ‘They really will shoot themselves, in preference to being used by the Ivans. Well. Some ladies are just romantic, aren’t they?’
*
In the pre-dawn twilight, we saw that the way out of the valley was a narrow slope, between boulders and frozen streams which glinted like steel. At least we could see the way now, and there were no collisions and no delays from bunching up as we progressed, with the Hanomags positioned in the middle between the Tigers, up onto the steppe to rejoin the road heading west. The land up there was shrouded in a freezing, grey fog which suited our purposes well that day – and we prayed it would last long enough to keep us hidden from the air above and the horizons beyond.
The first thing we encountered, as we straddled the wider road and increased speed to twenty kph, was the wreckage of one of our columns that must have been hit the previous day, around the time that we were fighting our battle against the Stalins. The road here was littered with the wreckage of trucks and wagons, evidently hit from the air by the Sturmoviks or similar aircraft. In the fog, three big Opel lorries loomed up, lying on their sides, still smouldering, their drivers dead in the cabs in grisly, frozen contortions.
Steppe birds resembling inland gulls were roosting on the debris, and picking at the corpses. Horse-drawn carts were here too – smashed open by bombs, with the horses stiff and dead, their legs pointing skyward. One horse was still alive, quivering and kicking on the ice – but none of us could spare a precious bullet to put it out of its agony.
Dead men lay along the road also. In places, the explosions and fires had melted the ice, and the bodies had sunk into it, and now hands, arms and legs projected up from the glassy drifts into the mist along the roadside. One cart had been carrying provisions, and one of the Hanomags paused to scoop up the boxes of tins and packets from the mud.
This attack had not been entirely one-sided, however: in the steppe beyond the road, we could just make out a recently-crashed Russian Sturmovik, buried nose-down in the tundra, the red star on its tailfin glowing bright in the milky vapour. A few kilometres further on, we found out how it was shot down.
A Flak half-track was by the roadside, half in a ditch. Its quadruple 20mm anti-aircraft cannon appeared undamaged, and as we approached, two young crew men emerged from the cab a
nd waved to us frantically.
I slowed the Tiger to a halt so that Helmann could shout down to them from the turret cupola.
‘What do you know of the Red positions?’ he yelled.
‘I believe they’re close, Herr Ober,’ one of the lads called up. The two of them looked like ragged schoolboys in their caps, mittens and greatcoats, with ice on their noses and their pinched cheeks. ‘But we have no radio, no phone line. We shot a Red plane down,’ he added proudly.
‘I saw that, and I congratulate you. Does your Flak work?’
‘If we can get it out of the ditch, sir, she’ll work fine. We have fuel for another day or so.’
We hauled the Flak half-track onto the road until it spluttered into life, and it took up position behind the Hanomags. Good Flak cover was a lucky find, and these boys seemed to know their business. I wasn’t sure how much they would need to do, though, as the fog seemed to cover us overhead, and even to left and right visibility was down to a hundred metres at most.
‘Excellent retreating weather!’ Kurt yelled at me over the bulkhead. ‘We’ll be at the river soon. And Helmann,’ he added in a lower voice, ‘Helmann will get some oak leaves on that pretty Iron Cross of his.’
‘You think so?’ Without my glass vision block, my face was frozen in the stream of air coming in, despite the balaclava and goggles I was wearing. ‘Why?’
‘Can’t you see? He’s got his own little battle group now, with his own Flak and everything. He even has a liaison officer from the Luftwaffe in the turret. In the Berlin Evening Post, they’ll call us Kampfgruppe Helmann, saviours of the eastern front. He gets his Kampfgruppe back to the river, he defends the crossing and he safeguards the whole front from a collapse. Into the bargain, he brings back an ultra-high quality prisoner with knowledge of codes and cyphers and scheisse knows what else, which makes a giant contribution to our military intelligence. It couldn’t be better, could it?’
‘You think that woman knows about cyphers and stuff?’
‘I think she knows a lot more than she’s saying. And Helmann thinks so, too. My God, but those interrogators will go to work on her with some energy. Such a pretty thing, too.’
I thought of her profile in the freezing dark, and the sudden scent of her hair. And then –
‘Scheisse,’ Wilf muttered. ‘What is that?’
We were entering a forested area, and beside the road, a large tree spread its bare branches over us in the fog. Hanging from the bough, I saw a series of bodies – six in all – hanging by nooses from their necks, utterly still. We passed under them, and then under another three of them further along. The bodies were recently hanged, all male, and in Russian combat clothing of quilted jackets and felt boots.
‘Those are partisans,’ Helmann’s voice came through the intercom. ‘Better to have them up there than in the forests around us. Our troops have cleaned out this zone, evidently. And there’s no time for reconnaissance now, we’ll go straight into the forest.’
The hanging bodies rotated slightly as the hot air of our exhausts brushed underneath them as we advanced, while their staring eyes looked down at us from broken-necked heads.
‘Partisans, this close to the river?’ I said to Kurt.
‘It looks like our boys dealt with them on the way through,’ he laughed. ‘See, there’s another tree-load.’
The road became a narrow track through the forest, with trees close to us, many of their branches strung with these dangling bodies. The fog was thinner among the trees, and I could see great shadows in the forest depths that might have hidden anything. Our convoy began to slow and bunch up, and Helmann cursed the loss of momentum, giving orders from his cupola to get the route cleared.
One of the Hanomags pulled aside, belching oily smoke, and the crew began to dismount, seeking to attend to the engine. I caught sight of the woman prisoner in the back of the vehicle, still in her hunched pose, still with two troops watching her. The two nurses were in there too, reclining and looking rather weary after their exertions. Helmann was shouting questions to the Hanomag crew, when there was a flash of light from the track up ahead.
It was a red-orange light that flickered wildly, lighting up the trees, and then died away. Smoke came drifting back down the path, and the three remaining Hanomags all pulled off the road, their crews manning the cab machine guns. I drove forward into the vacated roadway, and advanced up the track, with Kurt hunched over his gun in readiness and Helmann barking questions into his radio to the other crews.
The panzer slithered around an angle in the track – and I saw the nearest Tiger on fire.
‘An engine fire?’ I said – but this was more than that.
The whole back of the Tiger was burning, with blazing liquid dripping down the hull and pooling in the road. A crewman was crouching on the turret, spraying an extinguisher – but as he laboured, I saw his head jerk back, and his skull fragmented into several pieces which span away in the misty air. His body flopped forwards, and landed in the pool of burning gasoline on the ground.
‘Scheisse! Sniper!’ Kurt said.
I heard Helmann come crashing back down into the turret; the gun traversed, and the hull echoed as Wilf the gunner sent a burst of his co-axial MG into the trees, shattering the frozen branches.
On the forest track, the crew in the burning Tiger had a choice – stay and fry in their machine, or take the chance in the open. They flew out of the hatches like rabbits, leaping down and sprinting for cover towards our Tiger. Puffs of mud flew up from the track as the sniper followed them with bullets, and one crew man was hit in the leg. As he lay, clutching his thigh, he was hit again in his torso, making his body convulse as the bullets ripped him up. One of his comrades began to run back to him, and that man was cut down as well, with a bullet going clean through his chest and ricocheting off our front plate. A Hanomag came careering past us, its gunner blasting his MG42 along the tree line, the twenty bullets per second demolishing entire trees in splinters of wood and ice.
Just as the Hanomag passed the dead men in the road, the flames came again.
‘It’s a flamethrower,’ Kurt said, and he began shooting with his ball-mounted MG.
From the side of the forest track, a long line of flames was erupting – literally spurting from the shadows, and covering the Hanomag in front of us in a shower of orange flames. I saw the Panzergrenadier on the Hanomag MG drenched in this fire, his whole torso becoming a torch as it covered him, and then the flames splashed down into the open compartment. The rear doors opened, and two men tore out, their clothing on fire, followed by many other men completely engulfed in flames. They sprawled in the mud and ice, trying to beat the flames out, writhing and tearing at the ground.
Kurt was shooting MG rounds past the burning vehicle, hitting trees and bracken along the track, but I couldn’t see his target, only a trail of burning liquid leading into the forest. We were in a bad situation – hemmed in by trees, facing woods full of shadows, the track clogged with slowed or stationary vehicles.
‘He’s by the fallen tree,’ Helmann said in my ear. ‘I see his flame. He’s behind the fallen tree.’
There was a fallen tree in the shadows – a gnarled old thing, covered in ice. I saw the ice glimmer, reflecting the small flame that burns in a flame-gun nozzle and lights the jet of fuel. When close to a tank, a flamethrower can destroy a sixty-tonne monster in seconds, by burning out the grilles, sending liquid fire through the hatch seals – or blinding a driver who has no glass block to shield his face . . .
The 88mm roared above me, and the fallen tree blew up with a high-explosive round that lifted and threw it down many metres away. To no avail – the spurt of fire came again and poured across the road towards our Tiger, drenching the burning men in front of us in more flames. Both their Hanomag and the other Tiger were fully ablaze now – the Hanomag with its dead MG gunner still standing at his gun, wreathed in smoke, and the Tiger with its crewman in the pool of burning liquid in the road. The smell of b
urning flesh came to me through the open vision port: a sickly, roasting smell over the stench of gasoline.
Kurt kept firing, but the flamethrower shot out its tongue again, splashing our drive wheel and coating our track-guards in a thick, orange fire. One more burst like that, and we would be on fire like our comrades. I reversed, but immediately we crashed into an obstacle at the rear. Helmann shouted that this was another Tiger, that we just reversed into our fellow panzer – and with that, I knew there was a danger that two of us panzers would be trapped and set ablaze by this one flame-gunner in the woods.
I shunted into forward gear, and took the Tiger forward so quickly that the front lifted up off the ground; then I slammed the hull down into the woods, sending trees flying out from under our tracks. Kurt kept firing – and I could actually see the flame-gunner now: a tall man hunched over a rifle-shaped weapon that was dribbling burning liquid, connected by a tube to a fuel pack on his back. He was staggering as trees fell around him. He straightened up and aimed at us, but Kurt was quick on his MG34.
Kurt’s tracer rounds went right through the flame-gunner, piercing his fuel tank and sending plumes of fire out behind him as the bullets tore through and went off into the woods. In his shadowy hiding place, the man was suddenly lit up with flames – an absolute spiral of fire that reached twenty or thirty metres into the air above him. He slumped and disappeared in the blaze, while I reversed back onto the path, dragging a couple of trees with us in the wheels, and took up a position on the other side.
From there, I could see the chaos.
The Tiger that we had reversed into was stalled across the track, blocking it, while in front of it the burning vehicles were both engulfed in flames, the men on the ground burning as fiercely as the machines they had jumped from. Ahead of that, a Tiger was standing guard a few hundred metres away, its turret revolving slowly, firing occasional bursts of MG into the trees. Our new Flak half-track was there, too, its barrels horizontal, traversing along the tree line and sending out bursts of thick, white tracer that smashed whole tree trunks to pieces.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 6
