by Colin Gee
Nodding in appreciation, the Leutnant undid the flask and poured some of whatever it was down Aschmann’s throat, causing a violent reaction of coughing and spluttering.
“And again, Hubert. Get some more down you, man.”
Moving across to the field telephone, Janjowksi spun the handle.
“Janjowksi here. I must to speak to the Hauptmann.”
“He’s not here, Herr Leutnant. He’s gone to Seven Kompagnie. The bastards’ve broken through on that side, Herr Leutnant. He said if you contacted, to use your judgement. Stay there if you are needed, or get back fast and reinforce Seven Kompagnie if not.”
“OK…”
His words trailed away.
He stood carefully, with the handset still to his ear, and looked around, listening for the sounds of renewed combat, only just appreciating that the enemy artillery and mortars had all but ceased.
He felt happy that the situation was restored but for Aschmann…
“… if the Herr Hauptmann contacts you, let him know I ‘m sending my force back to him with orders to support Seven Kompagnie. I am staying here to assist Nine Kompagnie until I’m not needed. Alles klar?”
“Alles klar, Herr Leutnant.”
Tossing the handset on to the ground, Janjowski summoned two men to him.
“Gefreiter, take the men back, fast as you can. Seven are in trouble… go straight there. Leave me five men. Klar?”
The man acknowledged and disappeared, summoning his group to him.
The other man, a wounded Unteroffizier, waited patiently for his orders.
“Can you walk, man?”
“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.”
“Right, come with me, and let’s put our defences back together.”
Whilst the two toured Ninth Company’s positions…
…Whilst the pioneers withdrew over the Saale…
…Whilst Grenadieres of the 897th clung to the slopes of Heights 397 and 420…
…Whilst reinforcements sent by Oberstleutnant Bremer were bogged down under artillery fire at Ockensen…
…Seven Company was fighting for its life.
1331 hrs, Saturday, 20th July 1946, Height 462, near Marienhagen, Germany.
Keller moaned and pressed his fingers to the sticky hole in his arm.
The bullet had passed straight through without hitting the bone, but it bled like a burst dam, and hurt like hell.
The man who fired it had been almost cut in half by a torrent of fire from a friendly weapon down the slope.
Schneider, his Mauser across his knees, tied a dressing to Keller’s arm, inducing a squeal and a threat to remove part of the signaller’s anatomy.
“Calm yourself, Stabsfeldwebel. Unless I miss my guess, this’ll mean the Wound Badge in Gold for you.”
The sounds of fighting were not abating, and the dressing was hastily done.
Rising up, Keller immediately bundled Schneider to one side.
“Granate!”
The explosion threw earth and stones over the pair, but no more than that.
Keller was up and moving instantly, his MP-40 sweeping two running Guardsmen off their feet and sending both tumbling back down the slope.
He paused and looked over his lines, and it was immediately obvious that the enemy were almost on top of his men, with only a few places where the assault had withered away in front of the trenches, those mainly being where the 34s and 42s had plied their trade.
An egg grenade loomed large before his eyes and he swung his weapon two handed, deflecting the charge away far enough that it was of no concern.
More Soviet infantrymen rushed up the slope, and he dropped low, steadied his weapon, and emptied his magazine.
Two still came on, one leaking vital red fluid, and Keller instantly knew he had no time to reload.
One of the two went down hard before he heard the rifle shot in his ear.
Schneider worked the bolt to chamber another round.
“Fuck! Watch out!”
Schneider rolled away as two more Russians loomed out of the trench to their right, and a burst of fire did nothing more than disturb the earth where he had been kneeling the moment before.
The Kar-98k spat another bullet, clipping the enemy submachine gunner, but the second man was on Schneider before he could reload.
The signaller screamed in pain and terror as the bayonet lunge tore through the material of his tunic, slicing the flesh down to his collarbone.
He shoved with both hands, and his rifle struck the enemy’s weapon, giving him enough leverage to separate himself from his assailant.
The enemy soldier, his face a mask of fear and concentration, lunged again, but Schneider deflected the attack easily, pushing the weapon off to the left of his body, allowing him to jab his rifle butt forward in an attempt to knock the teeth out of his opponent’s ugly face.
The man ducked his head, and the metal butt plate clanged against the metal of the guardsman’s helmet.
They drew apart again, taking up a stance with their weapons to the fore, seeking an opportunity to attack.
In the corner of his eye, Schneider could see Keller throttling the life out of one enemy soldier, his MP-40 crushing the man’s windpipe, the soft skin split by both by the action of the rear sight and the man’s clawing nails.
Keller’s mouth emitted an animal-like snarling as humanity was brushed aside for the most basic of instincts; survival.
‘Scheisse!’
Schneider yelped as he realised his attention had wandered, albeit for the shortest of moments, and the Russian had seen the opportunity.
Instinctively, he sucked in his stomach and twisted, sensing the passage of metal the smallest of distances from his flesh.
The Russian overbalanced and stumbled forward.
Schneider jabbed opportunistically, and the muzzle of his weapon punched into the man’s chest.
Had his bayonet been fixed, he would have won the duel there and then, but, although winded, the Soviet infantryman was still in the fight.
Rolling away, the Russian lost his grip on his rifle, and desperately looked for a weapon.
Schneider worked the bolt of his rifle and blew the man’s throat into a bloody mess of shattered flesh.
Keller had finished disposing of his opponent, and took the time to put another clip in his SMG, before he dropped to one knee and sucked in as much air as he could.
“You alright, Stabs?”
Keller, panting like a greyhound, gave Schneider a baleful look.
“Think so…”
The NCO stood on shaky legs and tried hard to control his breathing.
Something he saw did it for him.
“Mein Gott! Quick!”
Schneider followed the suddenly sprinting NCO, and found himself at the nearby machine-gun position.
Trying not to stand on the moaning gunner, or in what was left of the loader, the signaller grabbed the ammo belt of the MG-34, ready to feed it through his fingers.
Keller pulled the trigger, aiming at the body of Russians he had seen charging into one of his platoon positions.
The weapon leapt into life, but most of the first burst went wildly overhead.
Leaning more into the butt and controlling his heavy breathing, Keller brought the gun back on target and swept the line of guardsmen with a veritable tempest of bullets.
Over half of the enemy were bowled over, buying time for Keller’s platoon to gather themselves and step forward.
Rifles and sub-machine guns fired virtually point-blank and, for good measure, a couple of stick grenades added to the slaughter.
Schneider added another belt to the length as his NCO looked around for further threats.
He had no need to look far, a full platoon of heavily armed guardsmen suddenly emerging from a defile to the right of his position.
“Gun right”, shouted Keller, as he dragged the weapon around.
The belt snagged and nearly parted the links, but Schneider reacted jus
t in time.
Settling the bipod, Keller took aim and let rip.
The air above the Soviets filled with 7.92mm, missing every man.
“Scheisse!”
They had seen the machine-gun and dropped into cover immediately before the fire erupted from the machine-gun post.
“Need more ammo!”
“Then get it!”
Keller fired two to three bullet bursts down the slope, hitting nothing, but successfully pinning the enemy platoon in place.
Between each burst, he looked around the position, seeking more ammunition… and spotting…
‘Stielhandgranate!’
He sent the last of his bullets downrange and made a decision.
Schneider had already disappeared in search of more ammo belts, so Keller discarded the weapon and grabbed the grenades one by one, arming each with a simple tug on the cord, and sending them downhill to explode amongst the bushes and rocks where the enemy platoon had gone to ground.
The second one sent a man flying into the air, performing a lazy somersault, even in death.
All six flew through the air and landed in the general area of the enemy platoon.
Schneider, bleeding from a nasty ear wound, flew back into the position, and spilled the contents of one ammo box on the parapet.
Thrusting the tab through the receiver, he prepared the MG-34.
Having grabbed the dead loader’s rifle, the Stabsfeldwebel was firing at targets, real and imagined, hoping to keep their heads down for as long as possible.
The silence from the machine-gun emboldened the guardsmen and, under orders from their commander, they rose up and charged.
“Urrah! Urrah!”
Schneider clipped two belts together as his company CO grasped the gun and settled his cheek on the wood.
The gun burst into life, jerking and wagging from side to side, as Keller sought to put as many bullets on target as humanly possible.
The Soviet soldiers fell in numbers, but pressed hard, gaining ground, even in the face of the lethal storm Keller was creating.
“Barrel!”
The one in the gun glowed a dull red, and Keller made the instinctive decision to change it rather than jam the weapon.
He’d spotted a spare near the grenades, so grabbed it instantly, flicking the catch on the gun, and accepting the burns to the tips of his fingers.
The hot barrel dropped free as he manoeuvred the gun.
He inserted the new, all the time watching the enemy get closer, again enthused by the weapon’s silence.
Schneider clipped two more belts together, adding them to the belt already in.
“Go, go, go!”
Keller needed no second bidding and dropped the leading man with a burst that nearly decapitated the Soviet officer.
The guardsmen screamed in anger and their legs pumped hard, closing down the distance as quick as they could.
“Urrah!”
The MG-34 cut many of them down, but the others just kept coming.
Had he had the time to comment, Keller would have ventured that it was the bravest charge he had ever seen.
The gun jammed, Schneider’s inexperience finally coming home to roost as he twisted the feed.
Six Russians remained, full of fight, and with vengeance in their hearts.
Keller picked up the discarded MG barrel, feeling enough heat to know that he was damaging his fingers, and brought it down on the fingers of the first rifleman into the position, breaking bone and splitting flesh.
The man howled and dropped his weapon, whilst somehow also aiming a punch at his opponent’s face, a punch that missed as the hot barrel crashed into the side of his head, and the Guards Corporal lost further interest in the battle.
Schneider struggled to pull his Walther from its holster and only managed a single shot before he was bowled over by a flying Russian.
Keller tried to brain the next man, but lost his grip on the barrel, which flew away harmlessly.
He ducked under a flailing rifle butt and punched the man hard, almost bending him in two, as his solid fist combined with the soldier’s forward momentum to bring about a telling blow.
A glancing blow struck his wounded arm and felled the Stabsfeldwebel, as another enemy came at him from the side.
Keller and Schneider were now both down, and both on their backs in the gun pit with enemy soldiers gaining the advantage.
The signaller flailed with his legs, trying to find some leverage to push his assailant off.
He screamed in pure agony as another enemy stamped hard on his left leg, the snap as the bone parted louder than any gunshot to the ears of those battling in the gun position.
His opponent gained the upper hand and Schneider started to pass out as the hands restricted his throat more and more.
Keller took a heavy blow to the forehead, as his enemy head-butted him, although fortunately not with enough accuracy.
His eyes watered with the stinging pain, and Keller realised that his arm wound was leaking blood once more and had started to surrender its strength.
His right hand was on the Russian’s jaw, so he grabbed a moment’s opportunity and twisted on the heavy bone.
Whatever he did, it visited excruciating pain on the enemy soldier, and the man fell back, clutching his face in his hands, only to be replaced by the latest arrival in the gun pit.
Keller could only scream and protect himself with outstretched arms as the guardsman lunged with his bayonet.
Von Scharf ran as fast as he could, understanding that even a second’s delay could lose them the position, and therefore, the height.
It had been the absence of communication from Seventh Company, combined with the sounds of a battle growing more frantic by the second that had drawn him.
Grabbing every spare man he could find, von Scharf arrived just as the Soviets were on the verge of success.
His men moved left and right, hammering into the groups of enemy who had invested the summit, whilst others dropped into position and opened up a heavy fire on the guardsmen still toiling up the slope.
The intervention tipped the balance in favour of the defenders, and most of the enemy started the process of falling back, leaving half their number behind, in one way or another.
However, von Scharf only had eyes for the cameo in front of him.
Keller’s scream was superseded by that of the enemy rifleman, as a burst of sub-machine gunfire stitched across his shoulders.
He continued to squeal with pain as he dropped face first onto Keller with his lifeblood draining away and his useless nerveless arms unable to do anything to stop the bleeding.
Next to Keller’s confused form, the metal butt plate of a Mauser smashed into the side of a guardsman’s skull, and a rough kick directed the dead body away from falling on top of Schneider.
The position was suddenly only occupied by the men of 3rd Battalion, save for the dead of both sides.
Von Scharf beckoned to three men.
“You two man this weapon… you, get at least four cases of ammunition here immediately. Move!”
Other hands grabbed Keller and Schneider and pulled them out of the gun pit and, with surprisingly more care and reverence, recovered the bodies of the two-gun crew.
Less reverently, two Soviet bodies were pushed into place to temporarily strengthen the position; the other enemy corpses were sent rolling down the hill.
Only the occasional shot interrupted the conversation back at Keller’s forward position.
“You look like shit, Stabsfeldwebel.”
Aching in places he didn’t know he had, Keller intended no humour.
“I feel like shit, Herr Hauptmann.”
A sanits arrived and went to work, the grey-faced Schneider getting first use of his medical bag.
A simple dose of morphine put the signaller out for the count, allowing the orderly to straighten and splint the ruined leg.
Keller and von Scharf shared a tug on the former’s wat
er bottle.
“Cigarette.”
Keller had lost his manners, but it didn’t matter, and his commander pushed a lit one between his lips.
“Want to give me a verbal report for now, Hermann?”
It was meant as a light-hearted comment, but fell on stony ground.
‘The bastards attacked… we shot the bastards… strangled the bastards… the bastards fucked off.’
Keller rejected the idea immediately and went for the simpler option.
“Not quite now, if that’s alright, Herr Hauptmann.”
Neither man said any more, and they withdrew into the satisfaction of a cigarette and the unadulterated pleasure that a survivor draws from post-battle silence.
1530 hrs, Saturday, 20th July 1946, Height 462, near Marienhagen, Germany.
The Soviets had tried again, but got nowhere near their previous high-water mark.
The attack had simply petered out.
It actually hadn’t existed in front of Eighth Company’s positions at all, and von Scharf had decided to risk reconstituting his reserve force by pulling men from the Eighth to form it.
His main problem now was ammunition and water, one he was addressing by stockpiling weapons and ammunition from the dead of both sides, as well as scavenging for anything drinkable or edible amongst the corpses.
Von Scharf also risked a small party to take all the empty water bottles they could find and head back to the river in the valley behind them.
He consumed a pack of dry biscuits, washed down with some acidic red wine, and surveyed the battalion situation map, seeking out any weaknesses that he might have previously missed.
Reports from his companies showed differing fortunes for the Soviet advance.
Heights 397 and 420 were quiet. According to Keller’s 2IC, the Soviet attack formations had withdrawn back to the Saale, and in some cases, to their starting positions.
The only aircraft seen in the skies overhead were now Allied, although they had shared the space with a number of Soviet aircraft for a short and violent period of time.
Honours were even as both sides lost three aircraft each, but the sky belonged to the Allied air forces.
