Another Stuka was pursued up and over the ridge of the heights – the last sight we had of it was a trail of black smoke and sparks as the Russian fighter shot pieces off its tailplane. A third Stuka was hit in the engine, and fragments of its propeller and cowling span down onto the battlefield. Unlike the armoured Sturmoviks, our Stukas had no metal plate to protect the crew and engine, and any rounds tore pieces from its fragile skin. That Stuka rolled around and banked out of my sight, dipping towards the river.
The fourth Stuka that I could see was torn to bits in mid-air by two fighters on its tail, their machine gun rounds chewing along its gull wings and then smashing off the glass cockpit canopy, blasting the cockpit interior. The Stuka reared up, and twisted upside down – throwing out the two crew men, who fell, writhing, to earth – striking the ground while their aircraft was still in the sky. The empty plane went rolling over to the south, with flames gushing from its nose.
Our Luftwaffe pilot shouted in despair, as his comrades’ victory was turned to humiliation before his eyes. Even then, one of those Russian fighters had not finished with us, because it banked around, pursued by stabs of our Flak, and charged at us along the line of the river. Its gun rounds strafed along the infantry trenches, hit two of our Panthers harmlessly, and then hammered on the top of our hull, the echo fading quickly.
Our Flak caught that fighter almost by accident, as the plane banked into a stream of tracer, and the Red aircraft spurted a cloud of flame as its fuel exploded. The fuselage and engine soared down and went skidding along the snow like a sledge, with its pilot still inside the blazing cockpit. The wreck finally dug into the snow nose-first; its tail, with the defiant red star emblem, rose up vertically and stood burning between the two battle groups of opposing tanks.
I heard Helmann and Wilf talking urgently on the headphones, and at the same time, the Russian woman behind me began laughing in her bitter, almost hysterical way.
‘Leave the body,’ Helmann was saying. ‘I shall load the gun now myself. We have only a few rounds left, anyway.’
‘The Luftwaffe man is hit?’ I asked over the intercom.
‘The verdamm fool put his head out of the hatch,’ Wilf’s voice replied. ‘They shot his handsome head right off his shoulders.’
I heard a crash behind me, and the Russian woman started screaming. I looked around, to see the body of the pilot – the headless body, I realised – which had just fallen from the turret hatch onto the hull floor. It lay there, spurting blood, while the prisoner scrabbled to get away from it in the confined space.
‘Twenty minutes until midday,’ Helmann shouted. ‘The eyes of Germany are on us now.’
Our radio man glanced around at the beheaded corpse and the screaming woman.
‘If the eyes of Germany could see this scheisse,’ he muttered. ‘Watch now, Faust. They are coming for us again. You see?’
Yes, the Stalins were coming for us.
With the Stukas gone, the squat machines found their momentum again, and formed up against us in a jagged, inverted circle formation. Their intention was clearly to surround us, to bring their edges in along the river bank and form a noose around us, with Reds on all sides and the river at our backs. They must be aware of our defensive reinforcements assembling on the western side – indeed, from their higher ground they could of course see our forces collecting over there – and they surely had a desperate urgency to pour across the bridge and spread out before our counter-attacking forces could resist their surge.
The Stalins came on, and Helmann in the turret was telling Wilf to wait, wait until they were close. Our other panzers were exercising the same discipline, and even when the Stalins began firing, we held our shots until the enemy shells were already exploding against us. I felt one Stalin round hit the outer bulkhead in front of me, and scabs of metal plate flew off and smashed against my chest. The round did not penetrate, though, although the armour where it struck was dented inwards from the impact.
In response, Wilf opened fire, and the final fight for the crossing point began with the boom of our 88mm and the straight line of our red tracer, directly into the glacis plate of a Stalin coming towards us. The Stalin lost power, and as it slowed it turned its hull flank to us. Wilf punched through it with another round, and the Stalin halted in a cloud of snow, its entire back end lifting up into the air as its running gear locked. One of the bunker PAKS shot right through the engine deck, the shell exiting underneath the tank even before its rear came back down onto the snow. A pillar of flame erupted from its back hull, and Wilf laughed softly.
Now I was a driver with nowhere to drive. The bunkers were behind us, the PAKS firing over us into the Red mass, and to left and right were our handful of comrade panzers, each of them firing now and using the last of its ammunition in these final minutes.
The Stalins began to move around us, two of them lumbering up to the very bank of the river beyond our last Panther, and firing into the Panther from the flank. I saw one round deflect off the Panther’s turret – and then another round smash open the cupola, and a third break pieces off the rear hull near the engine. The Panther kept firing, as smoke and then flames issued from its rear deck; firing on and on at the attackers, even as more Stalin shells were raking into it from the flank. One final Ivan round lifted off the whole turret, which split apart and sent pieces whirling into the air. I saw the crew inside, as damaged as their proud machine, lying in the empty turret ring as the flames spread around them.
Wilf above me was firing, and Helmann was loading the breech with grunts and curses, but loading it well because we hit another Stalin in the drive wheel. The steel wheel went racing into the air and hit another Stalin, bouncing off it and rolling away across the snow.
The damaged tank shed more wheels and track, digging a long groove in the snow as it came to a halt. One of the Panthers astutely raced to its flank and shot it from the side, then rotated its turret and shot at another Stalin approaching behind it. That Stalin, I saw through my grimy glass block, was carrying a squad of infantry on its rear deck – men clinging on to hand grips on the turret. The Stalin halted, and the infantry leaped off into the snow. Wearing white winter suits, they struggled through the powder towards us, while behind them their Stalin and our Panther shot at each other from less than three hundred metres range.
The Panther was the victor there, putting a 75mm round precisely under the Stalin’s gun mantle, which seemed to jam the Russian tank’s turret and armament. I watched as the Panther prowled to one side, traversed its gun, and finished its opponent at point-blank range with a round into the hull.
Numbers, though, were always our enemy – numbers and lack of ammunition, and the river behind us which prevented us reversing, breaking out to the sides and flanking our enemy in a counter-attack. Instead, our Tiger remained largely static, taking hit after hit on our hull and turret while Wilf calmly aimed and fired what shells he had left.
More of the Stalins were carrying infantry now, halting to let them jump down and go to ground or to advance on us through the snow. The MG beside me spat out its rounds at them, until its smoke filled the gunner’s compartment and mine. The Red troops hung back, sheltering behind the red-splattered bodies of their friends, waiting for us to be finished before they charged.
The hits on us rose to a crescendo, rounds smashing into us again and again, their resounding crash and echo accompanied by Helmann’s curses and the shrieks of the Russian woman, still chained behind me with the decapitated corpse of the pilot. One Ivan round hit our front plate in the centre, and the transmission began grinding badly, with boiling lubricant spurting into my legs. My drugged body registered the pain distantly, and even when another shell hit the top of my hull and went howling off across the snow, I blinked, recognised the fact but did not flinch. I was aware that we were being steadily shot to pieces; locked into my tiny, steel compartment I waited either for the end or for orders from Helmann.
Even when a shell finally pierced ou
r armour, and came in through the radio man’s compartment wall, I only realised slowly what had happened. Fragments of white-hot metal flew across from his side, and ricocheted off the hull wall, followed by a lump of red metal which smashed off the bulkhead behind me and exited upward out of my hatch – straight up through the empty circle.
I shook myself, unable to take in the situation.
I heard the radio man groan, and then I saw him convulse, as I slowly turned my head to look at him. The Russian armour-piercing round had entered through a hole in the steel beside him, which was still smoking, and it had punched through his chest before rebounding and hitting my side of the hull. His torso was ripped open, and the steam from inside him was mingling with the smoke drifting around in the hull.
Then another round hit us, and this one split open the hull roof from the front wall, showing a scrap of the winter sky in the gap. Our Tiger was being knocked apart, blow by blow.
I felt the familiar kick in my back from Helmann’s boot, and heard his voice close behind me.
‘Reverse, Faust, for God’s sake. We’re going back over the bridge now.’
‘Is it the time?’ I said, stupidly.
‘Reverse or I’ll shoot you and drive it myself,’ he said calmly. Behind him, the Russian woman was staring at me, splattered with the fresh blood of the dead Luftwaffe man.
I reversed, following shouted directions from the turret, aiming for the bridge access between the bunkers. Through the vision block in front of me, I saw one of our Panthers charging from left to right, seeking to ram a Stalin that was advancing on the bridge. The Panther was hit as it moved, the gun mantle lifting off in a starburst of sparks, and another round shooting off the entire back plate behind the engine. The engine tumbled out in a flood of burning fuel, but the panzer had enough momentum to ram the JS, knocking it sideways and partly on its side. Another Stalin rolled up alongside the two conjoined vehicles, and shot the Panther one last time through the top of the hull.
As we reversed away, I saw the Panther being shredded apart by Russian shells, fired from ten metres distance, until it was consumed in the blaze of its own fuel.
More shells hit our Tiger, and one blew away our right track, so that we could only limp back, the offside running gear jammed and dragging in the snow. In this state, I felt the back of the panzer lift onto the access ramp to the bridge. There, the transmission screamed and went suddenly quiet.
I tried the starter repeatedly – but the Maybach did not respond. The giant beast was truly dead. In the quiet, I heard the crackle of flames from the engine compartment. I jerked into life, as the smell of gasoline filled the vehicle. We had only a little fuel remaining, but what there was seemed to be seeping into the hull space – enough to incinerate us all in our steel box.
‘Exit the panzer,’ Helmann shouted, but I was already clambering up through my open hatch into the freezing air of the battlefield. Despite my alarm, and the shells flying past me, I stopped dead for a moment. I had witnessed disjointed parts of this battle through my driver’s port – but now the full situation became clear.
The red sun was directly overhead in its metallic sky. On the plain, and on the slopes leading up to the ridge, scores of vehicles lay smashed and burning – Stalins, our panzers, and the wreckage of the other vehicles abandoned in the retreat. Wreckage of downed aircraft lay among them, both the Stukas and the tail of that crashed Russian fighter, still burning vertically, its red star now scorched away. The surviving Stalins were probing to the bunkers, and only our comrade Tiger and two Panthers remained to deny them. Coming down from the ridge, the huge SU guns were crawling towards the carnage also, determined to feast on our destruction.
Between the tanks, groups of Red infantry were advancing, exchanging murderous fire with our troops in the slit trenches. Our Flak Wagon was firing horizontally, cutting down the Reds as they tried to rush the bridge. It took one shot from an SU gun to blow the brave wagon to pieces, sending the four Flak barrels whirling through the air like straws.
Exposed as I was on the Tiger’s hull, I shook myself, and ran around the Tiger’s turret to shelter behind its bulk, although the engine grilles that I stood on were flickering with flames. With shock, I found that the Luftwaffe pilot’s decapitated head was lying there on the rear hull, with its blue eyes staring up at the sky.
I heard the Russian woman scream from inside the hull – but then Wilf emerged, and Helmann, both scrambling out of their turrets.
‘The prisoner,’ I shouted. ‘She is chained in there.’
‘Leave her,’ Wilf said. ‘The panzer is finished. It’s burning.’
Helmann, holding his MP40, slapped me on the back.
‘You want to rescue a lady in distress?’ he goaded me. ‘Please go ahead.’ He gave me a small key.
I looked at him, saw the way his feline grey eyes were gleaming in the light of the flames, and I dived down back through the gunner’s hatch. Russian bullets were smacking on the armour around me and whining off into the snow. Inside the turret, I could just see the woman through the smoke, struggling with her chains. Beside her, the pilot’s mutilated body was starting to flicker with flames as the leaking gasoline soaked his clothing.
The woman was chained to the turret bars with a handcuff clasp. I used Helmann’s key to undo this, and I pulled the chain free. Flames began to spurt from the slots of the engine bay, hissing and roaring as the engine burned fully. Russian shells crashed into the front of the Tiger and broke off more pieces – the MG ball mount, the side wall of the dead radio man’s position – with deafening retorts. I grabbed the woman by the waist and hoisted her up into the turret, away from the worst of the flames, and opened the circular hatch in the turret rear.
I pushed her out of this head-first, and she wriggled and bucked to get through, into the smoke and flames coming from the engine deck. I saw Helmann grab her and pull her clear, and I followed her out. I fell onto the burning engine vents and rolled off, onto the snow at the rear. The woman, Wilf and Helmann were down there now, sheltering behind the Tiger’s rear plate as the front of the panzer was demolished by enemy shots. With no ammunition left to explode, and only minimal fuel to burn off, the Tiger simply stood as a steel blockhouse, shuddering as each new round hit it.
I saw one of the Panthers hit as well, its turret blown completely away in a cascade of fragments, and the crew inside left as charred figures in the hull. The crew of the other Panther, clearly out of ammunition, jumped from their vehicle and tried to run back to the bunkers. A squad of Red infantry caught them, and bayoneted them as they ran. One of the Russians ran right past them, firing a heavy calibre gun, and he sprinted to the bridge access itself. Bullets from our infantry were pitching around him in the snow. He was hit, and slumped down next to us behind our Tiger, blood soaking through his white overalls from his thigh.
He looked at us, found he could not reach his gun, and reluctantly raised his hands in surrender. Helmann shot him in the chest with one bullet; then he turned to me, Wilf and the woman.
‘I see our other Tiger is coming,’ he yelled. ‘We jump onto it and we cross the bridge.’
The battle around the bunkers was becoming a ragged, vicious infantry engagement now. Our mortar team behind the bunkers were firing blindly onto the plain, their rounds hitting groups of Russians as they surged forwards. Each time, the Reds climbed over the shattered bodies of their comrades while the smoke of the explosion was still in the air, and charged on. Some of our troops rose from their trenches and fought hand-to-hand with the Ivans, clubbing and slashing at each other with rifle stocks and bayonets. Other German soldiers broke and ran back to the bridge, everyone aware that its destruction was a matter of minutes now – and aware that any man left behind on the Russian side was worse than dead. Those that retreated, however, fared more badly than the ones who stayed and fought, because the Red troops brought many of them down with machine gun fire as they rushed past us.
I saw a pair of the SU guns
lumber close to the bunkers, bulldozing aside a burning Panther, and begin firing at point-blank range with their colossal battleship guns into the concrete walls. Pieces of blockwork flew off and were thrown across the river, hitting those few Germans who were running headlong over the bridge.
Our second Tiger rattled close to us. Its engine was juddering and oil smoke was pouring from its vents – but it was still moving, and reversing up onto the bridge ramp. I think its commander saw us from the cupola ports, because it slowed slightly. Helmann and Wilf grabbed the crumpled track covers and swung themselves up onto the rear deck, behind the protective bulk of the turret. I grabbed the woman and threw her up there, helped by the two men, and then I clambered up to join them.
This Tiger was pitted and scarred with multiple shell strikes, its hatches partly blown off and several wheels missing on one side, making it sway wildly. On the side of the turret, an armour piercing round was embedded in the steel plate, not having penetrated through, still smoking hot. Shrapnel and bullets screeched in the air.
Beside me, Wilf was hit in the body and leg by small arms fire, and lay slumped on the grilles, his chest heaving. I put my body over the woman as the Tiger swayed back again, reversing up the ramp and onto the bridge span itself.
I glimpsed, around the turret, our own precious Tiger.
Its front hull was shot away and its engine deck was burning fully, with parts of the turret hanging off. A superb machine, a slayer and protector of men, smashed to pieces under the Red hammer. Beside it, one of the bunkers had its entire roof blown away by an SU shell, and the concrete slab crashed down onto the few troops who were trying to escape through its rear doors, crushing them under tonnes of mass. The remaining mortar troops abandoned their weapons and bolted for the bridge. I saw the body of the grey-haired artillery officer lying on the river bank. Had he set his timing device to blow the bridge?
The other bunker was being assaulted by a Stalin tank which was driving along its wall, under the slit embrasure, with a Red soldier standing on the turret roof, caring nothing for his life. He was armed with a flamethrower, and he was pouring a stream of fire through the embrasure, flooding the inside with orange flames. The PAK gun was submerged in fire which overflowed the aperture and gushed down the walls. The flame-gunner was shot down by the last MG post in the bunker wall, sending him tumbling into the snow to burn among his own flames – but his task was done. As we reversed away over the bridge, both bunkers erupted in orange fire.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Page 13
