I checked the fuel gauge, and saw that we had enough now for maybe thirty kilometres – enough to get to the river. The other two Tigers had the same, and we syphoned the fuel from the Hanomag and put it in the Flak wagon, which carried our dismounted crew men too. We replenished our small arms ammunition from the bodies in the roadway, and fired up the Tiger engines, ready to leave.
The road was strewn with dead Germans, dead Russians, pieces of debris from the smashed Deutz trucks, red wine and thousands of cigarettes, all sinking into the mud and being covered in snow. The last Deutz truck in the line was untouched, though, and as we were leaving, I couldn’t resist seeing what was inside the thing. More black market goods, or was it something more useful? I nudged the truck’s body with the front of our tracks as we went past, ripping a long hole in the flimsy metal sides, and tearing the truck open from end to end.
I stopped the panzer and stared inside.
The interior of the vehicle was fitted out like some kind of bar, or night club. It had velvet drapes on the walls, couches, a chandelier swaying in the ceiling, and a very large bed covered in furs and quilts. Seated on the couches, and sprawled on the beds, were several women – maybe half a dozen – in stylish underwear and night dresses, staring back at me with shadowed, bleary eyes. Most of the girls had bruises and cuts, and they all looked drunk. Drunk, drugged and apparently unaware of what was happening around them.
‘I’ve heard about this, but I’ve never seen it,’ Kurt said. ‘It’s an officers’ mobile brothel. That would keep you warm on a cold night, eh?’
‘Move on, Faust,’ Helmann ordered me through the intercom. ‘Follow the other panzers.’
We left the exposed brothel, its complement of drugged whores and the wreckage of the battle as we moved off and followed the outline of the road visible as a darker ribbon through the snow on either side.
‘An officers’ brothel. That’s where she’ll end up,’ Kurt said, gesturing behind him to the hull and the Russian woman still chained to the turret ring. ‘If there’s anything left of her after the interrogators are finished. I’ve heard they have special ways to make Russian women talk.’
‘She’s just a radio operator.’
‘Yeah? Did you see those Ivans in the T34s without the turrets? They came racing up here to look for something, just like those other three foot soldiers who appeared yesterday. I think they were looking for a certain missing radio team, and Helmann thinks so too. She’ll be talking soon enough, anyway.’
I shrugged, although I too had heard stories about what our intelligence interrogators did to women, the methods they used and how quickly women talked in their presence. I tried not to think about them doing their work on the Russian woman behind me.
They used a table, I had heard, and pieces of steel tube.
I kept a fifty-metre distance between our Tiger and the two in front of us, the last three panzers remaining of our twenty-strong company from the previous day. The Flak wagon was scuttling along out in front of them, picking its way around the abandoned carts, cars and dumped equipment which we in the panzers could bulldoze aside or simply crush. The Tigers in front of me flattened a series of Kubelwagen cars abandoned in the axle-deep mud, and smashed aside a giant artillery gun on a ten-wheeled carriage that was tipped on its side across the road. The knots of straggling troops jumped out of our way, or implored us for a ride to the river point, but we stopped for nobody now.
I knew that even when we got to the river, our first task would be to immediately fight in defence of the crossing point, to hold back the reds as long as possible. The thought filled me with cold in my spirit.
‘The river,’ Helmann said at one point. ‘It is beyond this ridge. Keep following the road.’
The road was becoming impossible to trace, however, from my driving position, even with my handsome new vision block in place. The path of differently-coloured snow was being wiped away, and the whole landscape in front of us was a single, uniform expanse of Russian snow.
‘It’ll be two metres deep by the morning,’ Kurt muttered. ‘Or three. It’ll be a schneeslacht tomorrow, a snow battle for that bridge.’
Up ahead, the Flak wagon was struggling to make progress; I could see it on a curve, its tracks spinning and throwing out chunks of ice. The leading Tiger got behind it and pushed it clear, and with many operations like that our three panzers plus the Flak crawled and groaned over the crest of a ridge, and angled down onto the other side. There, through the dense snow, I could just make out the river in the middle distance.
The river, at last.
It was a wide, black band set between white banks, its surface reflecting the steely clouds overhead. I saw the crossing point immediately – and as we progressed slowly down the slope, I took a look at the crossing through my binoculars. I saw immediately why it was so vulnerable to Red attack, and why we had to defend it.
The bridge itself was a steel structure barely a hundred metres in length, and easy to blow up as our forces retreated. It stood, however, at a narrow point in the river, where the wide channel was compressed by outcrops of land on both sides. Even with the bridge blown, determined construction troops could surely throw another bridge across the narrow channel in hours. This would send the Red avengers hurtling onto the western bank and the borders of the Reich itself, which lay beyond the white, frozen horizon.
The slope of the high ground leading down to the river was a chaotic sprawl of vehicles, some moving and some abandoned. Two old Panzer IV types, with extra armour cladding on their turrets, were grinding their way down to the crossing. Red Cross medical trucks were making the same journey, and I pitied the shattered men inside as the vehicles lurched and bucked down the gradient. Hanomags and armoured cars slithered alongside lines of men with shouldered rifles, trudging ceaselessly downhill. The road was completely gone, and the troops and transports were spread out over a wide area, each traveller finding his own way down from the ridge to the river.
The crossing was guarded by two large concrete PAK bunkers, and a few dug-in Panther panzers with their very distinctive curved gun mantles, their long 75mm barrels pointing up at the steppe.
The bridge itself was a mass of vehicles and men, moving past and over each other, a living snake of men desperate to get across to the west before the Ivan pincers closed upon them. With my binoculars, I could see military field policemen in a few places along the bridge – the police with metal insignia on chains around their necks which gave their nickname of ‘Chain Dogs.’ They were trying to control the flux of retreating troops, and at times shots were fired in the air to make a point.
I saw a Hanomag on the bridge, a vehicle of the type we called ‘The Walking Stuka,’ fitted with rocket launchers on its hull; it lost control in the traffic and veered between the upright girders of the bridge span. It see-sawed for a second on the parapet. Then it toppled forward into the jet-black water, its tracks churning in a froth of spray, until it disappeared from sight. I saw nobody exit from its cab.
‘Follow those Panzer IVs down the slope,’ Helmann told me. ‘Stay in their tracks. If they can make it, we can make it.’
The snow was thicker than ever now, and without my binoculars the river below us was just a blur of black against white. Our three Tigers, with the Flak in front, followed the general direction that the Panzer IVs had taken, although in effect the impression of their treads was rapidly erased by the fresh snowfall.
We passed a Chain Dog officer who had his MP40 placed against the head of a wrong-doer, kicking the man in the back as he drove him ahead down the incline. There were several bodies lying in the snow, which seemed to have been shot in summary executions, as they were in a neat line with their boots removed for some unknown reason, and arranged in front of them. Passing infantrymen seized on the boots to replace their own worn-out gear, and carried them away eagerly. Some wounded men sat or lay in the snow, mute, looking in a pleading way at the passing traffic.
‘Shall I stop for
the wounded, Herr Ober?’ I asked Helmann on the intercom.
‘No. They will be picked up. Keep driving.’
The journey down the slope took almost an hour, with pauses as the traffic around us bunched up and vehicles crossed each other’s paths with shouted curses. I saw one man being run down by the Panzer IV ahead of us, his legs crushed but the man still alive, white-faced with shock as the panzer rolled away from him and a red stain spread across the snow around him. We had to barge a stalled Stug self-propelled gun out of our way, forcing it away into deeper snow while the crew yelled and threatened us from the hull roof. In the end, we came to the foot of the hill, and rolled up among the hundreds of troops who were thronging between the two concrete PAK bunkers and pouring on to the girder bridge itself.
‘Who is in command here?’ Helmann yelled at a soldier beside one bunker, manning an anti-aircraft MG post. The man saluted, and gestured down into the bunker, and then turned his greatcoat collar up against the cold.
*
I took my MP40 and accompanied Helmann into the bunker. The Russian woman was still on the hull floor, shivering and panting, although the air inside the Tiger was barely freezing compared to the conditions outside. The bunker itself was well-heated, with electric lights and the scent of a woodstove somewhere deep inside. The commander was a grey-haired artillery officer who studied us with bloodshot, dilated eyes.
‘Yes?’
‘I have brought three Tigers and a Flak for the defence of the crossing.’
‘Excellent. You will please dig in the Tigers in conjunction with the Panthers that we have. I expect the Reds to attack us very soon. The front has collapsed and the situation is very changeable.’
‘I have a high-value prisoner who must be taken to military intelligence.’
‘Put him on a transport,’ the officer shrugged. ‘The Chain Dogs will be leaving us soon, they can take him.’
‘It is a woman. She has important knowledge. I can only hand her to intelligence interrogators personally. She is significant, not just a normal prisoner. The Reds have already tried to recapture her from me.’
‘Who is she – Stalin’s favourite whore?’
‘I believe she has information about radio encryption.’
The artillery man raised an eyebrow, but shrugged again.
‘You are fighting with us here. You can keep your prisoner with you, or give her to the Chain Dogs. You make the decision, Herr Ober.’
In the concrete entrance at the bunker’s rear, the daylight was fading, and the rattle of vehicles, the shouts and curses of men, the keening of the wind, all came from beyond a descending curtain of snow that blotted out the sight of the retreat.
I saw Helmann thinking it over. I guessed it was a difficult decision for him. He wanted to be associated with the capture of this prisoner, I could see that. Giving her to the military police would break his claim on her. But to keep her here as the Russians surrounded us?
‘Shall we take her across the bridge, sir?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘In all that chaos, she will be killed or she will escape, and her value will be lost. We keep her in the Tiger, and let’s get ready.’
‘Sir.’
When we got back into the Tiger, though – the woman was gone. Her chain dangled empty on the turret cage, and the Luftwaffe man was nowhere to be seen either. Wilf was asleep on the gunner’s seat, and Kurt was snoring in the hull front. Helmann kicked Wilf awake.
‘Where is the verdamm woman, man? And where is the scheisse pilot?’
Wilf had no idea. The snow fell on our panzer, turning it white.
*
We found the two of them in a drift of snow beside the Tigers. We heard the woman before we saw her – grunting and gasping, and we waded through the white powder into a pocket of snow away from the road by the river. There were several corpses here, who were wounded men that had been left to die alone, with bandages and splints still on them. There was also the Russian woman, on her back, and the Luftwaffe man in his muddy flying suit, on top of her, unbuttoning his crotch and getting his hand over the woman’s mouth to silence her.
I locked eyes with her, over the pilot’s shoulder, and saw she was fighting hard – that she would fight all of us if necessary, until her strength gave out. That was not necessary, of course. Helmann kicked the pilot in the head, then again in the arse, and the man rolled off the prisoner and thumped the snow in frustration.
‘This is just some fun, Herr Ober,’ he said.
‘You know that this prisoner is important to me,’ Helmann said calmly. ‘I told my crew to keep her in the panzer. That means you.’
‘She wanted a piss,’ the pilot said, grinning. ‘And she’s a fine sight squatting in the snow.’
‘Idiot,’ Helmann muttered. ‘Luftwaffe idiot. This prisoner could change the course of this campaign. The course of the war.’
‘I think you are exaggerating, Herr Ober,’ the pilot laughed. ‘But I take it that I am discharged from your crew? You have spare men on the Flak wagon now. I can make my own way across the bridge and rejoin my geschwader.’
Helmann laughed in his unique way.
The woman stood up, panting and wiping her mouth, her chest heaving. The Luftwaffe pilot began to turn, and I thought he was going to run from us without further discussion. But then the sky over the river lit up in an orange flash, and a dreadful boom made my eardrums deaden. I saw pieces of debris whirling through the air over the river, illuminated by that huge orange flame, which was turning red and expanding as it burned. The four of us – me, Helmann, the pilot and the Russian woman – stood and stared at the fragments raining down onto the river, falling thicker and faster even than the snow. I realised that these were fragments of bodies – pieces of the men that had been crossing the bridge, now scattered to the air of Russia.
The explosions came rapidly, each one a ball of orange fire that lit up the whole river from our side to the other. Some of them hit the water, sending up clouds of steam, and some hit the bridge, turning it into a slaughterhouse. The four of us ran back to the Tiger, Helmann dragging the woman by her elbow, and me pushing the pilot in front of us. The pilot jumped very willingly into the panzer, which certainly looked like the safest place to be at that moment, and I slid through my hatch into my driver’s seat.
I felt the Russian woman behind me, looking over my shoulder through the vision slit, both of us watching the explosions outside.
‘Katyushas,’ Kurt muttered. ‘The Stalin Organ. Those rockets fly for six or seven kilometres, and they can fire twenty in a minute.’
The rockets were crashing in from somewhere further down the river bank, somewhere to the south, leaving trails of fire in the curtain of snow. They were hitting the bridge in salvos of three or four now, sometimes bouncing off the girders and spinning away into the air, but at other times exploding right on the crossing.
The vehicles on the bridge were being blown off into the water below, dozens of Opel trucks and Kubelwagens crashing down into the sheer black current. Even a Panzer II reconnaissance tank was thrown sideways; its commander was silhouetted in the hatch, flailing his arms, as the machine plummeted vertically into the river. As for the foot soldiers, they were carved up by the blast waves and metal fragments, their limbs whipping around as the impacts tore through the mass of men trapped on the channel. I saw one man who had gone mad, ripping his uniform off and standing on one of the girder arms, shouting into the air as the rockets came over again.
A projectile hit the steel beam and raced along the bridge surface without exploding, scything down men left and right until it ricocheted right off the far side. Men climbed the girders, threw themselves from the bridge, shot each other in the cut-throat stampede to reach the far side before the next impact. The air was full of screaming, detonations and the howl of the Katyusha rockets. The snowfall slackened off, and in the drifting flakes, as the bombardment ceased, the extent of the mayhem on the bridge was obvious. Scores of
burning, dismembered bodies lay there, together with burning vehicles and many horses, some dead and some alive.
One horse was on fire, kicking and bucking as its hide flickered with flames. It trampled many of the wounded men, its hoofs slamming into their bodies again and again, until someone shot it dead and it slumped, still burning, on the roadway.
The bridge structure was still intact. Its girders were torn and twisted, but the hundred metres of hard crossing were still in place. Realisation of this fact led to a renewed rush among the retreating infantry, with men charging onto the bridge before the next salvo fell.
‘We’ll have to go and find that Katyusha,’ Helmann said. ‘The Reds have smuggled it in somewhere close, under cover of the snow. It’ll go silent now, and then it’ll open up again overnight. If those rockets hit our few panzers, the Reds will storm across here in the morning.’
It was typical of him not to reflect on the casualties on the bridge, but to prioritise its defence as a strategic point.
‘You mean to take the Tiger along the riverbank, Herr Ober?’ I said. ‘In the dark, the snow, with our low fuel?’
‘Start the engine, Faust.’
*
We put the Russian girl into one of the other Tigers, and left them stationed near the bridge with the Panthers and the old Panzer IVs, their gun barrels traversing slowly.
The Luftwaffe pilot was still in place in our turret, functioning as our loader, which appeared to be Helmann’s way of punishing him for interfering with the prisoner. The pilot had lost his arrogance, and was pale and chastened. It occurred to me that, despite being a Stuka pilot, he had never seen the effect of explosions on a packed group of men at first hand.
I drove the Tiger at walking pace up onto the riverbank, where there were open fields that had not been mined. Thank God I had taken that new glass block for my vision slit – but even so, I could see virtually nothing outside except drifting snowflakes and the light of fires from the bridge behind us. Helmann gave me directions from the cupola, and we kept up a steady advance, with the blank, dark space of the river on our right.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 9
