The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945

by Wolfgang Faust

  ‘Painful.’

  ‘I wish I had morphine to give you.’

  ‘You have none in your medical bag? My arm is very painful now. Why don’t you give me morphine, Herr Feldwebel?’

  ‘We have used it all, madam.’

  ‘I do not believe you,’ she hissed, clutching her arm. ‘I think you are saving it for yourselves.’

  I said nothing, but as the Panther rumbled to yet another halt, at a junction of three roadways clogged with carts and even a civilian bus, crammed with wounded, I looked at her carefully for the first time. She was perhaps forty years of age, with grey eyes that were burning with indignation.

  ‘Just a little morphine,’ she repeated. ‘Please.’

  In front of our Panther, an ambulance cart was stuck, its horse collapsing on its forelegs in exhaustion, the wounded troops in the wagon crying out as they were jolted by the people swarming past.

  ‘I used the last of my panzer crew’s morphine two days ago,’ I said. ‘One of my men was hit by a shell splinter. In the kidneys. It took him three days to die, but we kept him out of pain for as long as we could. When our morphine ran out, he begged me to shoot him.’

  She wiped her nose with her hand, evidently chastened.

  ‘And did you shoot him?’

  ‘Yes, I shot him in the head. I hope someone does that to me if I’m in that condition. But listen, I’ll find you some morphine along the road here somewhere. You have been useful.’

  The sounds of battle were loud to the south and east, and it seemed that even in the Kessel the Russians were probing at our forces and wearing us down. Infantrymen ran in from the perimeters, shouting that the Reds were forcing their way into the Kessel in groups of two or three panzers.

  The trees began to thin slightly, and at intervals it was possible to see the outlines of Soviet aircraft moving over the tree canopy in the blue evening sky. We tore down more foliage to drape over our hulls and turrets, and watched the sky with a desperate urgency before we moved along any stretch of the track that was even slightly exposed.

  At an exposed clearing among the trees, we encountered a unit of three Jagdpanzers – low tank destroyers on a Panzer IV chassis, an excellent weapon – and we halted behind them while they scanned the open gap in the treetops for planes. The first Jagdpanzer moved away, surging along the exposed track and beyond it into deeper, thicker forest. The second vehicle paused, revved and did likewise, dashing through the clearing. The final Jagdpanzer took a long time to check the sky – until our troops were calling out to it to move or get off of the path. Its commander ignored the cries, if he could even hear them, and finally gave the command to move.

  Just as the low, squat vehicle lurched off onto the clearing, the shapes of Sturmoviks tore over us, their shadows filling the roadway. The Jagdpanzer accelerated, committed now to making a break for the denser trees, and made it half way. Then a volley of rockets smashed down through the trees, splitting the branches apart, and struck the Jagdpanzer directly on its flank.

  The machine reared up into the air, crashed down on its tracks and lost control. With smoke pouring from its grilles, it veered sideways into the trees beside the road, knocking down several in its momentum and tipping over onto its side. The trees swayed and crashed to the ground – and this only exposed the stretch of road more brutally, giving the Red pilots a clearer view of what was down there in the forest. Flames poured from the Jagdpanzer’s engine as it came to a stop in a whirl of broken wood, its upper deck facing the break in the tree cover.

  The people clinging to my Panther leaped off and began running into the deeper forest, as everybody could see what was about to happen. Civilians, troops and medics – all leaped and scrambled away from us, away from the target of the Sturmoviks. Only the civilian woman stayed, clinging to the turret rear, apparently too fearful to move, as I scanned the sky for returning aircraft. I saw none and could hear none – and told my driver to drive like a devil across the clearing. It was a risk – but it was riskier to stay where we were, with the tree cover broken and the Jagdpanzer on fire to mark the target.

  I dropped down into the turret, and my driver put us in motion with a force that flung me back against the rear wall. Through the periscopes, I saw the trees flashing past, and the burning panzer, with a crewman trying to drag himself out of the hatch, his whole torso on fire. Then the road in front of us lit up with exploding rockets, which ripped up the earth and trees, and sent a barrage of shrapnel over the panzer, the fragments hammering on the hull as we swept over the smoke of the explosion.

  The panzers behind us did not delay in making their move, and in a minute, both our Panthers and the two King Tigers were across and moving into the comparative safety of the thicker tree cover. After some distance, we paused, and I went up through the cupola to assess the state of the hull. Around us, our troops and civilians were slowly reassembling, having run after us through the trees.

  On the engine deck of my Panther, the civilian woman was lying on her back on the engine grilles, her clothes blackened by oil fumes and shredded by the shrapnel from the rockets. Her eyes were open and she was still breathing, but the air was escaping from her chest wounds in long hissing sounds. I lifted her and passed her down to civilians on the ground. The movement caused her a lot of pain, and she cried softly, with her eyes rolling back in her head. The Capo came and stood next to me, his hands on his hips.

  ‘We have to move on,’ he said, looking at the woman. ‘The Jabos (fighter-bombers) are everywhere.’

  ‘I promised to find this woman morphine,’ I said. ‘And we have none left.’

  ‘She’s dying.’

  ‘She helped us find the path. She was useful to us.’

  The Capo sighed, and called for his own Panther’s medical kit. He took a morphine ampoule, and injected it into her arm. The woman moaned as it took effect, and opened her eyes. Her hands fumbled, and she dragged from her pocket a photograph which she thrust at me. I took it, and the woman became still. I guessed that her death was ten or twenty minutes away. At least she was dreaming.

  I glanced at the photo she had given me. It showed a young woman of eighteen or twenty, the resemblance to the dying woman suggesting that it was her daughter. I frowned, and I put the picture in my tunic pocket, as more aircraft screamed in low above the trees, and the road that we had just passed over erupted in bursts of orange flame. I forgot about the photograph until much later.

  *

  Further along the track, the primitive road was scarred with craters from recent bombing, and our progress was slowed as we had to manoeuvre past these craters among the other traffic. In many cases, the craters were being bridged crudely with planks and logs, the labour being done by the doomed men that we called Hiwis.

  The Hiwis were the Hilfswilliger: the ‘Willing Helpers.’ These were Soviet troops who had surrendered to our forces in the good years of 1941 and 1942, when it seemed to everyone that the German steamroller would crush the USSR flat. At the time, these men were faced with prison camps that consisted of great squares of barbed wire – no huts, no tents, no shelter of any kind. No food except the weeds, and no water except the rain. How many had we killed in those encampments, while our guards looked in through the wire as the Reds killed each other and ate the corpses raw? Was it a million, or – as some rumours said – was it actually two million that we starved to death? The Hiwis had volunteered to help the German armies as a way out of that hell, working for us as labourers, drivers and in other unarmed roles. Their reward was to keep living, to eat a ration every day and have a blanket at night. After Kursk in 1943, the Red soldiers became less prompt to surrender, and those that did were reluctant to work for us. They told us that the penalty for being captured was that their families would be sent to a Gulag in the Arctic.

  Now the Hiwis in German territory were caught between two crushing forces. If they stopped helping us, they were of no further value, and did not deserve a ration. Their punishment would be a bull
et or a noose. Their only consolation was that the Russians did not know they were taken prisoner, and so their families were safe. But if they were captured by the Russians now, their identities would eventually be uncovered – and both the Hiwis and their families would face a death sentence. What can a man do in such a situation, faced with such a choice? Some Hiwis killed themselves by whatever means they could find, while others continued to cooperate with our troops, hoping that in this way they could stave off their inevitable destiny. Their faces were set in masks of stress and fear, and their work was the work of condemned men, grim and methodical.

  We came upon a gang of Hiwis which was some ten in number; men wearing a ragged mix of Russian and German uniforms and civilian clothing. These men had evidently survived years of their role, and were thin, with hollow eyes and shaved heads. They were hauling a 75mm PAK gun by hand out of a bomb crater as the gun crew simply stood and watched. The gun tractor was in a ditch beside the road, its engine pouring out smoke. As we passed by, other infantry ran past, shouting a warning that the Reds were close.

  The trees to our left were bulldozed down, and as they fell we saw the green snout of A T34 pushing through them, barely fifty metres away. I could see another Red panzer behind it, and a squad of Red infantry too, clambering over the fallen tree trunks to get to us. There were screams from the civilians nearby, as, after so many years of being told about the Red beasts, the beasts themselves suddenly appeared in the flesh.

  The Hiwis, meanwhile, ducked down into the bomb crater, leaving the PAK gun perched on the edge and the gun crew scrambling for their carbines. As the civilians stampeded away, I went down into the turret, ordered the Panther to halt, turn to face the Reds and fire as soon as the gunner was able.

  It became a race to take the first shot. In panzer duels, the opening shot is often the deciding one if it strikes home; even if it does not destroy the enemy vehicle, it may damage the tracks or concuss the crew and buy precious seconds for a second shot. The task is to use a combination of the track differential to align the hull to the enemy tank, and the turret traverse to lay the shot itself, controlled by the gunner’s final hydraulics.

  An oddity of our Panthers was that only the gunner himself could traverse the turret – the commander had no traversing pedals of his own, and for those breathless seconds, while the gunner rotated the great turret left and right with his face against the padded rim of the gun sight, the gunner was the most important man in the machine. The Panther turret traversed slowly, but to our advantage we were already stationary, while the T34 was still labouring over the collapsed trees towards us.

  Our shot rang out, the tracer flew in its red line – and at that range, our 75mm round punched directly through the T34’s turret, below the gun mantle. Through my periscope, I saw the Red panzer recoil from the impact, and the machine crashed into an oak tree, uprooting it. The Red infantry spread around the crippled panzer without faltering, and even when the T34’s turret exploded off the hull in a column of flame, then came hurtling down to crush several infantrymen as it hit the ground – even then, they kept advancing on us.

  We fired from the bow machine gun, bringing down many of the Reds, and at the same time my gunner was sighting on the second T34, which was scrabbling over the wrecked trees in its eagerness to get at us. As its hull rose, we fired at its exposed belly plate – but our shot went wide as the panzer crashed down horizontally again, and we succeeded only in deflecting off the sloped front armour in a cloud of metal particles. My gunner cursed, and my loader worked like a devil to get the next round into the chamber – but as he closed the breech block, that second T34 opened up on us.

  I had expected a tracer round, or high explosive intended to tear off our tracks, but what erupted from the T34’s turret was a long, straight spurt of burning liquid, an absolute torrent of fire, which spurted through the trees towards us, the splashes catching one of the Red infantry as he scrambled to get clear, and setting the man on fire. The man’s comrades made no attempt to help him as he burned, but scattered through the trees away from the fire, moving around to our flank.

  This T34 was a Flammpanzer (flamethrower tank) fitted with a fire projector that resembled a normal gun, and its burst of flame caused so much smoke among the trees that it was impossible for a few seconds to see the vehicle itself. My gunner muttered to himself, his face pressed against the gun sight, making estimates of where the machine would exit the smoke, and traversing a fraction to lay his shot there. I told the loader to have a high-explosive round ready next, intending to blow away the flame tube on the enemy panzer. To our right, the Red infantry was exchanging shots with the PAK gunners and a squad of German troops who had come out from the forest – but of the thousands who must be hiding nearby in the trees, only about fifty came forward ready to defend the Kessel.

  As I looked back through the periscope at the smoke, the Flammpanzer crashed out of the flames and charged towards us, spurting a new line of incendiary liquid that flew wildly around the forest as the panzer swayed between the trees. The fire shot past us, but I knew that if the liquid hit our rear deck, the flames would immediately pour through the engine grilles and blow up our engine in an instant. We in the crew compartment would be reduced to ashes if we could not escape the hull in time. Already I could smell the stench of the Russian incendiary fuel, and feel the intense heat from its flames, even through our armour plate.

  Our round was fired in a hurry, and struck the edge of the T34’s turret, glancing off into the trees without penetrating at that oblique angle. The Flammpanzer lurched forward, traversing its turret to aim its fire directly at us, and elevating its projector tube to make sure that its flames poured down onto us from above. The Red commander did not get that chance. Our high explosive round exploded on the front of his turret, and, as I had hoped, the detonation wrenched off the thin flame projector, sending it spinning off into the trees, trailing a ribbon of flames. Liquid began to gush out from the shattered gun mantle, cascading down onto the front hull – and, as the T34 began to reverse back into the trees to escape us, we landed another high explosive round in the same place.

  The effect was immediate. The shrapnel must have set off the panzer’s liquid fuel reservoir for its flame gun, because the turret hatch blew open and a vertical blast of fire shot up into the air. All of us in the Panther crew muttered thanks that this fate was theirs, and not ours. What would it be like in the T34’s cramped hull, as the entire supply of fuel exploded, sending that tower of flames thirty or forty metres high? In seconds, the flames collapsed down onto the panzer, and it was enveloped in its own fire, wedged between burning trees and sending spirals of debris out into the forest as it blew itself to pieces.

  The battle was not over yet. The Red infantrymen, seeing their panzers destroyed, began to retreat, but kept up a barrage of machine gun fire at our troops as they withdrew. I saw that, passing the bomb crater with the PAK gun perched on its lip, the Reds shouted and gestured in triumph as they discovered the gang of Hiwi men sheltering inside there, unarmed. Our troops began to hold their fire – perhaps conserving their precious ammunition, but also, I suspected as I watched, waiting to see what the Russians would do with their fellow countrymen in the crater. I climbed out onto the rear deck to take a clear look around, and saw no more enemy panzers approaching from any direction. The burning Flammpanzer was still erupting in orange flames.

  I saw that the Russians were surrounding the crater, putting grenades down the barrel of the PAK gun to disable it, and firing their machine pistols down into the pit. I could just see the bodies of the Hiwis shuddering as they were torn up by the bullets fired by their compatriots. I shouted to one of our infantry on the ground, a young Feldwebel, to fire on the Reds and save the Hiwis, but it was too late. Their task completed, the Red infantry ran back into the trees towards their own lines, yelling and whooping in Russian.

  The whole forest fell quiet for a few moments, apart from the hiss and roar of the burning T34
in the trees. I asked the infantry Feldwebel why his men had not done more to help the Hiwis in the crater. He shrugged.

  ‘We have too many Hiwis in the Kessel already,’ he said. ‘They’re becoming a problem. If the Reds want to solve the problem for us, that’s fine.’

  As we skirted the crater and moved on, I glanced down into the pit. The Hiwis were jumbled in a heap at the bottom, their bodies still smoking from the bullet impacts. The damaged PAK gun was pushed in on top of them, and the scene was abandoned as the columns moved on to the West.

  *

  In the Halbe Kessel, the dead lay where they fell, or were dragged to one side of the track and left among the trees. I saw some bodies being thrown into marshes, and some being dropped into bomb craters. In my time inside the Kessel, I never saw a grave being dug or the earth being smoothed over a corpse.

  Our journey onward was slow, in the gathering shadows of the late evening. In this warm, dusty air, the sights, sounds and smells of the Kessel were stamped on my senses with a dreadful clarity. Inside the Panther turret, the air was heated and rank with fuel and explosive, the transmission churning in the hull floor below the turret cage. We dumped our spent 75mm shell cases from the collection box below the gun, throwing them out of the loader’s hatch in the turret rear, and left all the hatches open in an attempt to ventilate the compartment. The Panther’s lack of a loader’s roof hatch made the attempt difficult. With my torso up through the commander’s cupola, I could see the two SS King Tigers lumbering behind us, still carrying their load of exhausted SS troopers. On our panzer, every centimetre was taken up with wounded men who had pleaded for a ride, who lay bandaged and clenching their fists, even across the turret roof. Even our sloped front plate, with its pocks and dents from enemy rounds that did not penetrate, was draped with men holding on by their feet to the front track covers.

  Explosions were all around us, rumbling in from the perimeter of the Kessel, and random artillery shells exploded in the tree canopy sporadically. We had to bulldoze our way past a row of Luftwaffe trucks which were abandoned in the road, fuel siphons still hanging from their gasoline tanks. In the midst of this great crisis, these trucks were loaded with paintings and silverware that seemed to be taken from churches, the contents tipped out by those passing on foot and cast aside in their search for the necessities of fuel, water and ammunition. A large crater beside the track was full of corpses, troops and civilians, adults and children, thrown in without order or ceremony. The smell of decay made my stomach bunch as we passed. In an area of marsh in a forest clearing, the green surface of the bog was dotted with vehicles that had been pushed in away from the road. Among them, a superb Jagdpanther tank-hunter vehicle was sunk up to its roof, with birds already settling on its cupola.