We had one Hanomag left now, with four Tigers and the Flak wagon. The Hanomag was listing to one side, and its machine gun shield was shot away. The Tigers were trailing oily smoke, and the one ahead of me had a loose track which was buckling as it moved. My own Tiger was groaning as it moved, the running gear grinding as the dish wheels made friction against each other. On my dials, the oil pressure was red and the volt meter was at zero – I gave up looking at them.
‘Thirty kilometres,’ Helmann said in my headphones. ‘We keep going. Nobody stops.’
Over the bulkhead, Kurt was reloading his MG34 with a new magazine drum.
‘My last one,’ he said, kissing it. ‘My special baby. I filled it with the special rounds – the hollow-nosed ones. Any Ivan who gets between me and that river gets this.’
‘We get to the river – and then what?’ I said.
‘Then the next river, and the next one, and the river after that.’
‘All the rivers, back to the Reich?’
He didn’t answer me, as he fitted the magazine.
*
Two Tigers in front, then the two half-tracks, then our third Tiger and finally us. We had to slow because the road was cratered and strewn with boulders, and the change in speed only demonstrated how much maintenance the Tiger needed. The transmission was steaming with oil, and the compartment was filled with acrid fumes that made me glad of the cold air blasting in through my open visor.
The road became crowded with retreating troops.
We passed knots of infantry, slogging their way west without officers or transport. They tried to flag us down, but we kept going, following the wide, rough road towards the river. We passed wagons, mobile kitchens and radio trucks, towed artillery and troops on horseback, all the flotsam of a full-scale retreat, and everyone heading for the safe barrier of the river.
The only gauge that I looked at now was the fuel dial – and that was touching zero. The Tiger drank three litres of gasoline to cover each kilometre, even at optimum speed. At high speed, and with all the revving and manoeuvring we had done in the forest, we were consuming five or even six litres per kilometre. I alerted Helmann to this, and he cursed. He jumped down, and appeared crouching behind me in the hull, banging his fist on the bulkhead gauges.
‘They’ve been wrong before,’ he said. His breath was thick with cognac.
‘Not the fuel gauge, Herr Ober. The fuel is accurate.’
‘Verdamm gasoline will lose us this war. Those Reds are lucky, they can burn as much diesel oil as they like; they get it from the Caucasus.’
‘What shall I do, sir?’
He slammed the bulkhead.
‘How many more kilometres left?’
‘Five, maybe six. It’s operating on fumes, sir.’
‘We will take fuel from another vehicle. Stop when I tell you.’
‘Sir.’
I thought that he meant to transfer fuel from one of the other Tigers – but of course they were running as low as we were. The huge disc of the sun had whitened and faded into the sky, and the air now was gunmetal-coloured, and sparkling with crystals of ice. To run out of fuel here, on the open plateau, almost within sight of the river – that would be a cruel fate, leaving us to hobble the last few kilometres on foot, pursued by Ivan.
‘There,’ Helmann said, slapping my shoulder as he hunched behind me, and pointing through the vision slit. ‘See those truck transports. We’ll take fuel from them. You, radio man, radio the other Tigers.’ Helmann clambered back up into the turret.
‘I don’t think he remembers my name,’ Kurt said as we halted.
I thought that was probably true.
*
The trucks were in a convoy of about ten: big Deutz lorries churning and slipping through the ice, making a stately five or six kph. As soon as we came alongside, they knew what we wanted. We pushed our Tigers close to them, forcing them to slow down and stop. One by one, they ground to a halt, and our three Tigers and two half-tracks came to a stop likewise. I cut the engine and climbed up through the hatch to see what was what. From the leading truck, a man in a civilian fur coat was standing on the running board, shouting at Helmann. His officer’s cap had the skull insignia of the SS.
‘Get away from my vehicles,’ he was yelling. ‘I am on the business of the Schutz Staffel and these are our transports.’
‘What is in your trucks?’ Helmann called down from the cupola.
‘That is not your concern. Move your panzers and let us proceed.’
‘My panzers are needed for the defence of the river. We must have fuel.’
‘You will take no fuel from us,’ the SS officer shouted. ‘You will be shot for this.’
I heard Helmann cackle with laughter. I noticed a few snowflakes drifting in the air, glinting in the overcast light, as hard as wire. The SS man reached into his cab and brought out a Luger machine pistol - an effeminate little gun that the police and security troops used. Helmann roared with laughter – and I was glad that I didn’t have to smell his breath.
We were saved from the confrontation by the Red Army itself.
One of the Deutz wagons was lifted off its wheels, and its metal sides split apart. A tracer round came out of the side, shooting across the road and disappearing across the plateau. The next round that hit was high explosive, and this blew the truck’s roof and walls off, sending them rotating in the falling snow. From inside the truck’s load compartment, thousands of small white shapes emerged, drifting in the air. Small, tubular shapes which I realised were –
‘Smokes,’ Kurt said. ‘Scheisse cigarettes.’
Our turret was already traversing left to aim at the attackers.
‘Face left, driver,’ Helmann shouted. ‘T34s.’
I rotated left, crunching our hull front against the nearest Opel truck and ripping its side open. Bottles fell out – bottles of wine, it appeared, which broke and splattered red on our prow. The smell of booze came in through the vision slit. I pushed forward to get past the truck, bulldozing it aside in a flurry of breaking glass and red wine. When we were clear, I saw the T34s on the plateau, through the snowflakes. Three of them. They were racing – faster than I ever saw a tank move before – perhaps proud of their chance to trap a panzer before the main army caught up behind them. They moved light and stripped down – their hulls bare, unpainted metal and their tracks throwing out streams of ice as they flattened down and charged at us across the steppe.
The 88mm gun over my head boomed out, and in the echo I heard the Russian woman in the hull behind me wailing. I looked round at her, and saw the empty shell case from the gun breech crash down on her, smoking with cordite. She convulsed and kicked it away like a rat.
Four Tigers against three T34s. This should have been an easy battle, but something in the way those Ivan tanks charged – the way they spat flames from their exhausts and ripped up the tundra below their tracks – that told me these crews weren’t interested in odds or calculations. They wanted to get a Tiger.
One of them, in the lead, was hit by a round from the Tiger on our right. I saw the shell smash into the turret and knock a scab of metal off, in a burst of debris. The T34 kept charging – in fact, it accelerated, with the air behind it distorting in its exhaust heat and the snow flying around it in a slipstream. It was hit again, on the hull front, and this round smashed off the driver’s visor, which span away.
The machine kept charging – so quickly that our gunners were shooting past it as it ploughed under their elevation, the 88mm rounds smacking into the fallen snow in useless puffs of white. A hundred metres from us, it began firing, and a round hit our gun mantle with a scream, deflecting down into the ground to bury itself. Our Luftwaffe friend began babbling his devotions again, and, over all the noise, the cursing and shooting, I heard the Russian woman laughing.
We shot straight into the hull front, and I saw our round penetrate and the T34’s structure shudder as the projectile whirled around inside there. By now I could see th
e face of their driver, in his smashed-open vision slit, a face covered with blood and neither dead nor alive. I saw that he was Asiatic, perhaps a Mongolian, with almond-shaped eyes and a goatee beard. That was the last thing I saw before he crashed his doomed tank into our line.
The T34 smashed through one of the Deutz lorries, and embedded itself into one of our Tigers, making the huge panzer rock sideways. I saw the SS commander in his fur coat jump from his wagon and run, as the Tiger began to reverse away from the impacted T34. The panzer lurched backwards, slithered in the roadway, and knocked down the SS man bodily. The Tiger crew had no idea of this, of course, and kept reversing. The SS man’s body was dragged up onto the tracks, the handsome fur coat torn to shreds, and then thrown out at the front.
The other two T34s charged right past us, lifting off the ground completely as they crossed the road, and literally flew off into the steppe on the other side.
The smashed T34 stood in the wreckage of the Deutz, its hatches opening up.
The two men who emerged were bloody, but I could see that their faces were lit by vengeance, battle-lust and perhaps vodka too. They jumped from the T34 just as a high-explosive 88mm round burst against it, showering them with fragments. An armour-piercing round went through the turret and erupted out of the open hatch like a rocket, heading skyward. By then, though, the two Red tank men were walking calmly towards our Tiger, holding pistols. Kurt, beside me, gripping his MG, laughed softly as he aimed.
Something reminded me of the previous tank battle – when those three Red infantry soldiers had appeared from that Stalin tank, looking for something. I glanced around at the Russian woman, and saw her staring through the vision slit, trying to see what was happening out there. I looked ahead again, just as Kurt opened fire with his special hollow-nosed bullets.
The effect of the hollow rounds on the two Ivans was catastrophic. Hit directly in their torsos, their arms were severed, and pieces of the exploding bullets flew out of their backs, trailing steam. One man was hit in the face, and his jawbone was smashed off, his teeth whirling like the snowflakes; the other man was hit in the belly, and his genitals were shot away as the slug did its work inside him and fragmented downward. The bodies lay steaming and smoking on the road, surrounded by pools of red SS wine and hundreds of cigarettes.
‘Nice,’ Kurt said.
‘Turn this panzer around,’ Helmann yelled in my earphone. ‘Faust, wake up, damn you.’
I shook myself, and rotated the Tiger on its differential, smashing the big cargo lorry again, so that we faced the two T34s that had leaped sideways across our roadway. They were turning around also, having travelled hundreds of metres in their impetus, and were now spinning to face us head-on.
I remembered the blank, almond eyes of the other driver, and I knew these were Russians from the interior of the Soviet Union, men with no fear, no nerves, and no hesitation. They didn’t care if they lived one minute and died the next, unlike us with our prayers and our politics. These were the men we were sent into Russia to fight, to keep them away from our culture and our architecture and our racial purity.
I must confess that I pissed myself.
Those T34s fired like maniacs, like lunatics, advancing on us through the snow that was now falling thickly out of the leaden sky behind them. Their bare steel hulls seemed to be part of the sky, part of the soil, part of Russia itself. Even when we shot their tracks off, they kept firing. Even when we blew the turret off one of them, the other kept advancing. Its shells struck us on the hull between Kurt and me, opening a crack of light between the vertical front and the hull roof over our heads, before the round ricocheted off. It raced to one side to hit us in the flank, but I rotated the Tiger onto it, feeling the Maybach engine falter as our fuel ran dry.
We shot that T34 in the turret, cracking it open like an egg and throwing the crew out across the steppe. We hit it in the hull, making the engine erupt in flames, and still the thing advanced on us. We shot though the front plate, splitting it open and making the whole thing spin around on its axis, trailing flames, coming to rest facing away from us.
The Tiger next to us put a round into its back plate.
The engine flew up out of the hull, dripping with burning oil, its pistons still cranking against the sky. Then the fuel ignited, and the T34 was enveloped in orange flames.
I wiped my face.
Beyond the burning T34, other vehicles were approaching us.
These were similar in appearance to T34s, but with no turret; the open hull ring filled with the heads and shoulders of soldiers in Red Army helmets. They were using these turretless tanks as personnel carriers, bringing soldiers into the conflict inside their sloped armour.
We shot up one of these things with an armour-piercing round, and the warhead caused obvious carnage inside the hull, as pieces of men and their weapons came flying out, on fire. That vehicle was hit again with high-explosive, and the whole machine tipped over, spilling its dozen occupants onto the ground and crushing them as a mother bear crushes its cubs. The other turretless tank still came on, however, taking two deflections off its front plate, until it came in below the elevation of our guns and slewed onto the road among us.
Our Flak wagon, which had remained silent all this time, now opened up, sending a hail of tracer down the road and onto the T34 soldier-carrier. The 20mm tracer shells rebounded off the sloped armour in a whirlwind of light, decapitating some of the soldiers inside who were still watching out of the turret ring. Their heads flew away across the road with the tracer that beheaded them. Our Flak paused, however, and I saw our Flak boys reloading the huge 20mm magazines one by one. The Tigers traversed and fired on the intruder, but by then the load of troops were scrambling out of the open hull, ten of them, and massing in the road. The T34 was blown apart behind them, but the Ivans didn’t even flinch as pieces of the armour plate flew around them.
Our last remaining Hanomag, packed with Panzergrenadiers, came alive as its crew poured out into the combat.
Our men were ragged, scorched, low on ammunition, but armed with anything they could hold. Like furious scarecrows they tore into the bunched groups of fresh Russians in the road, and the two enemies clawed at each other for survival. I saw a Panzergrenadier hacking at the throat of a Russian with an axe from the Hanomag’s tool kit, while his comrade used a pickaxe to pierce an Ivan’s chest. The Reds reeled, then regained their spirit, and fired into the Grenadiers, pouring bullets into them. One German manned the MG in the Hanomag’s cab, and shot down two of the Ivans before he was blown down by fire from the other Russians’ guns.
Beside me in the Tiger, Kurt aimed his MG, paused, aimed again and paused. Always, the troops were too close together, fighting hand to hand, for him to fire on. Indeed, all our Tigers held their fire, their turrets traversing across the steppe, looking for more threats, while the infantry fought to the death in the road among us.
Whenever a Russian emerged from the carnage and approached a Tiger, he was shot immediately by a ball-mounted Tiger MG. If a Panzergrenadier tried to withdraw, he was cut down in a few paces by Russian fire. We in the Tigers saw our Grenadiers decimated, man by man, and the open road become a charnel house as the infantry slaughtered each other. In the end, three Russians remained standing, and they leaped over the German corpses to burst into the empty compartment of the Hanomag.
‘Are you looking for something, Ivans?’ Helmann muttered in my earphones. ‘What are you seeking in there, my Red friends?’
Kurt fired on these three Ivans, and his hollow rounds spattered around them against the Hanomag sides – but the Russians were astute, and evidently accustomed to working under fire. One threw a grenade at us, and its blast blinded me for a moment, while Kurt held fire until he could see. By then, the Russians were swarming over the nearest Tiger, with grenades in their hands.
The MG men of the other panzers opened up, smacking the Tiger along its hull with MG rounds, and killing one of the Reds, who slumped into the road. The
other two, though, ducked behind the Tiger’s turret and disappeared. The Tiger began to rotate in the road, spinning on its axis point, trying to throw the men off its hull and crush them under the track links. It achieved this – and both men were hurled off as the panzer span around, their bodies being mangled beneath the treads. A moment later, though, their grenades exploded on the engine deck.
I saw the Tiger spin yet more frantically as its engine surged – and then shudder to a halt as it lost power. Dense smoke came from the engine grilles, and flames issued from the exhaust tubes – not the sparking flames of a Maybach running properly, but oily fire that showed the engine was now alight. The panzer rocked back and forth, then went still, as the flames grew higher, standing bright orange and black against the myriad glints of the falling snow.
‘We have three Tigers now,’ Kurt said, as we watched the panzer’s deck burn, and the Tiger crew jumped clear of the flames from the hatches. ‘A Kampfgruppe of three Tigers.’
‘And a Flak,’ I said. ‘And we found some gasoline.’
Before that burning Tiger was completely engulfed in flames, I ran over to it, reached into the driver’s hatch and took out the glass vision block – a great prize, which I fitted to my Tiger proudly.
*
We pumped fuel from the big Deutz lorries with hand cranks, working frantically as the snow thickened and built up on the steppe around us. Their fuel tanks were well filled. The truck drivers, all SS men, watched us viciously, with the mangled body of their officer, still in his fur coat, lying steaming on the snowy ground. We were driven by urgency. The snow might protect us from air attacks, but the main Red army could not be far away. Indeed, gangs of retreating men came running past us as we worked, shouting that the Reds were five kilometres distant, or three. A Kettenrad half-track came clattering past, a set of tracks with a motorbike wheel at the front, made for one man and now carrying four who clung on desperately.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 8
