Cauldron of Blood

by Leo Kessler

  Finally he crunched across the frozen snow to where the Wotan grouped around the remaining three Panthers, little fires already beneath their engines so that they would start immediately, once the operation got under way.

  Schulze clicked his heels together and was about to assume the position of attention but Peiper shook his head. ‘No games today, Schulze,’ he said, and indicated with a wave that the rest of the troopers should carry on eating.

  ‘Who are your tank commanders, Schulze?’ he asked.

  Schulze wiped a big hand across his mouth, flecked with bits of Old Man. ‘Me, for one. Corporal Matz for the other and — er — Sergeant-Major Metzger for number three.’

  Peiper smiled faintly. He knew there was no love lost between the two NCOs and that although Metzger out-ranked the Hamburger, it was Sergeant Schulze who was really running the Wotan detachment. ‘Good, you are all old heads, you know what to do?’

  Schulze smiled sourly. ‘I know what we should do, sir. Lift up our feet and run like hell before the Popovs carve the eggs off ‘n us!’

  ‘But you won’t, will you?’

  ‘Ner,’ Schulze answered with a look of mock disgust on his bearded face. ‘Though, quite frankly, Obersturm, I ought to have my head seen to for letting myself be talked into this kind of shit. My dear old Dad’d think I’ve not got all my cups in me cupboard if he knew that I’d volunteered.’

  Peiper laughed again and then his face grew serious once more, as the black shadows of the rapidly approaching dusk started to sweep across the steppe and he knew it would soon be time for them to be on their way. ‘You know the drill, Schulze? Cover our withdrawal with your own engines. Try to stall as long as possible, but don’t engage if you can help it and then when you think you can’t hold ’em any longer—’

  ‘Hoof it westwards like a bat outa hell,’ Schulze snarled.

  ‘Exactly, Schulze, don’t take any unnecessary risks. Colonel Geier — the Vulture, as I believe you call him behind his back — would never forgive me if you were let down by the Bodyguard.’

  Schulze’s look revealed what he thought of the Wotan’s CO but he held his peace.

  The handsome young SS officer held out his hand. ‘Schulze,’ he said, emotion in his voice for the first time. ‘Do your best for us, please... and look after yourselves....’

  Schulze clasped Peiper’s hand firmly, wondering whether he would ever see him again, as the wind now started to heighten, whipping up little flurries of snow from the steppe. ‘Don’t worry, sir, you’re not going to get rid of Mrs Schulze’s handsome son as easy as that.’

  ‘Good for you, Schulze.’ Peiper touched his hand to his cap. ‘Hals und Beinbruch, Kameraden!’ he snapped.

  ‘Danke, Hals und Beinbruch, Obersturmbannfuhrer,’ a score of hoarse voices echoed the greeting and then Peiper was gone, striding back to the break-out party.

  ‘All right for that fine-pisser,’ the Butcher sneered when the colonel was out of earshot. ‘He ain’t staying behind to have his turnip shot off. We are.’

  Schulze looked at the Butcher’s red angry face mildly amused. ‘Since when have you been a hero, Butcher?’ he asked mildly enough.

  ‘I’ve heard enough shit flying by my ears in my time, Schulze,’ the Butcher retorted.

  ‘Yer in a shit-house,’ Schulze quipped, then his smile was replaced by a worried frown. ‘Hey Butcher, you’re expert at listening at the door-jambs and looking through key-holes, what do you hear? What’s the big picture?’

  ‘Who do you shitting think I am — Jesus Christ? How should I know? Herr Peiper does not usually take me into his confidence.’

  ‘But you know something?’ Schulze persisted, gently clenching his fist.

  ‘A bit,’ the Butcher admitted grudgingly, eyeing the fist, which was now millimetres away from his chin. ‘But only a bit.’

  ‘A bit’s better than nothing — as the whore said to the midget. What gives?’

  ‘It’s something to do with air. The flyboys I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, what do you mean?’

  ‘The Luftwaffe is going to help us out in some way or other,’ the Butcher replied. ‘At least, that is what I got hold of.’

  ‘Yer should have got hold of yer salami instead and given it a couple o’ shakes, you silly slime-shitter! How do you think the Luftwaffe’s gonna help us?’ Schulze asked scornfully. ‘Fat Hermann perhaps coming down out of the sky like Father Christmas?’ Schulze broke off suddenly, knowing that there was no use trying to crack the mystery which surrounded Peiper’s sudden decision to break-out. ‘Well, I don ‘t give the flyboys much of a chance with that sky, Butcher,’ he said. ‘It looks to me as if we’ll have a real old father-and-mother of a snowstorm before this night is over.’ With that, he turned and started to look for Matz.

  *

  Thirty minutes before zero hour, with the wind sweeping across the steppe at eighty kilometres an hour, slashing the frozen faces of the waiting, tense soldiers with a myriad of razor-sharp ice crystals, Matz reappeared, obviously very pleased with himself in spite of the tension and the murderous wind.

  ‘Where have you been all this time?’ Schulze yelled from his position in the turret of the lead tank.

  Coolly Matz warmed his hands on the fire burning under the Panther’s engine, ‘Out for a walk,’ he answered.

  ‘What do you mean, out for a walk! Where in God’s name, could you go for a walk here?’

  Matz looked up at him and despite the howling wind managed a knowing wink.

  ‘Have yer got something in yer eye, you peg-legged horse’s arse?’ Schulze demanded, already an inkling of what Matz had been up to beginning to form in his brain.

  ‘A gentleman has his secrets,’ Matz replied mysteriously.

  ‘Since when have you been a gentleman, you three-times toasted tortoise-turd? You don’t even know the meaning of the word. You’ve been seeing Gerda, haven’t you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to stop me saying goodbye to my betrothed, would you, Schulze?’ Matz wheedled, that triumphant knowing smile still on his wizened face.

  ‘You’ve had it in, you sneaking little shit?’ Schulze roared, knowing that he had been tricked. ‘You know we agreed that we’d take it in turns and because of my higher rank, I’d get first chance of sticking my salami into her. You’ve broken yer promise. Such piggery!’

  Matz seemed unconcerned by his running-mate’s fury. ‘Ah, but she loves me, Gerda does and love transcends rank.’

  ‘I’ll transcend you with this!’ Schulze doubled his fist and seemed about to clamber over the turret.

  But as Matz backed away hurriedly, there came three shrill whistle blasts from the gloom to their rear. It was Peiper’s signal; in five minutes his convoy would begin moving out.

  Schulze forgot Matz’s treachery. He pressed his throatmike, as Matz hobbled to his own tank. ‘To all,’ he ordered, ‘Start up now!’

  Below, his driver turned the engine. It rumbled throatily, but did not start. Schulze kicked the driver’s right shoulder impatiently. ‘Get that damned box of tricks of yours moving, driver,’ he snarled, knowing in exactly five minutes the convoy would start to move out. By then, the Panther’s engines would have been going full-blast to drown any sound the departing vehicles might make.

  Anxiously the driver tried again and again. There was a loud whirring sound, like a chest-sufferer drawing a long asthmatic breath. With a sudden roar the Maybach engine burst into noisy life.

  ‘Don’t stall it for God’s sake!’ Schulze yelled urgently, as the driver clamped his foot down hard on the accelerator, and across the way Matz’s driver succeeded in starting his engine too, followed an instant later by that of the Butcher’s Panther.

  Now all three great engines were roaring at full blast, turning the dusk into a frenzied bedlam.

  Half a kilometre away the Russians reacted almost immediately. Green, red and silver flares started to arc urgently into the ever-darkening sky, and from the right flank there came the
slow pedantic chatter of an old-fashioned Soviet machine gun, sending white tracer curving lazily towards the German positions.

  Satisfied that the ruse was working, at least for the time being, Schulze pressed the throatmike, ‘To all,’ he said. ‘Keep those engines going full blast. Remember I’ll have the nuts off ’n any driver who stalls his motor. Obersturmbannfuhrer Peiper is moving out now. Over and out!’

  Hastily Schulze clambered up and out of the turret, pulling off the headset. Peiper was indeed moving out. He could just see the heavy, low slung shapes of the halftracks through the gloom, as they left the ruins heading out into no-man’s land, moving almost soundlessly, any noise they made drowned by the ear-splitting din of the Panthers. ‘Good luck, you jammy bastards,’ he said enviously, wondering if they would get away with it, and realizing with a sudden shock that now Wotan was on its own again.

  The big break-out had commenced...

  FIVE

  Major von Igel, CO of the Black Eagle Squadron, wrenched open the door of the Met shack with all his strength and thrust himself inside, gasping for breath. He banged it closed and stamped the snow off his gleaming boots.

  Standing next to the glowing pot-bellied stove, Karsten, the Met officer, a World War I veteran, took the English briar pipe out of his mouth and grinned. ‘Windy, eh?’

  Von Igel tugged his cap back into its normal rakish position and opening his fur coat, shook the snowflakes off it, listening to them hiss as they landed on the stove. ‘Somewhat — and you might be as kind as to remove that big arse of yours from in front of the stove and let your sorely tried CO get warm. I nearly froze my nuts solid coming over here from Ops.’

  ‘Zu Befehl, Herr Major,’ the Met officer said in high good-humour — after all he had been in his warm shack all afternoon — and moved out of the way.

  Shivering, the CO warmed his frozen fingers over the stove, while the wind howled outside, making the blacked-out windows rattle and buffeting the wooden structure, as if it might blow away at any moment.

  ‘And what can I do for the Herr Major?’ the Met officer said after a moment.

  ‘Get me some shitting good weather,’ von Igel snorted.

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Oh, not really,’ von Igel replied lightly. ‘Just had the Greatest Captain of All Times on the blower a few minutes ago, asking if we would be able to carry out our mission in spite of the weather.’ He looked down at his nails in mock modesty. ‘Nothing very important really.’

  ‘Heaven, arse and cloudburst! The Fuhrer?’

  ‘The same.’

  The hut rocked as a tremendous gust of wind struck the flimsy structure and the door flew open admitting a flurry of driving snow.

  Hastily von Igel crossed the room and slammed it closed once more. ‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ he panted. ‘Get your incense out and your ju-ju beads. Conjure the old Black Eagles some halfway reasonable flying weather.’

  ‘What’s the form, Kurt?’ the Met officer asked, serious now after the mention of the Fuhrer’s interest.

  ‘Oh the usual,’ von Igel answered. ‘Nothing very problematical — just the impossible. The Fuhrer is going to use us to get that SS death-or-glory boy Jochen Peiper — you’ve probably seen his handsome mug on the front covers of the illustrated papers?’ The Met officer nodded. ‘Well, he’s gone and got himself trapped in the Kessel. Well we’ve got to carve him out.’

  ‘But how? The Black Eagles are a dive-bombing squadron.’

  ‘The most famous there is, if I do say so. We’ve bombed the shit out of the Polacks, the Frogs, the Tommies, the Popovs. Eight Knight’s Crosses in 1941 alone. But old friend,’ von Igel’s handsome face creased in a worried frown, ‘the day of the Stuka is over. The enemy fighters, even those Popov Yaks, are too fast for us. We are as doomed as the dodo.’

  ‘But what has all this got to do with the Fuhrer, Peiper and the weather?’ the Met officer protested. ‘Perhaps I’m getting old, Kurt, but I really...’

  The CO put his hand soothingly on the other officer’s arm, ‘Now don’t get into a fluster, old chap. Don’t worry your poor greying head about it. All will be explained. Give me a lung-torpedo and Uncle von Igel will tell all.’

  The Met officer handed him a cigarette from the desk and von Igel lit it slowly, his face thoughtful, before he started to explain.

  ‘As you know, the Stuka was produced in tremendous quantities before the war for the blitzkrieg. At last reading there were some three or four Stukas available for every single jockey trained to ride the old mare.’ The other man nodded his understanding. ‘Now that the stubble-hoppers of the Wehrmacht are getting a bit thin on the ground, the Fuhrer or some genius on his staff has come up with the brilliant idea of using all those spare planes as a kind of artillery of the air.’

  ‘Artillery of the air?’ the other man echoed.

  ‘Yeah, I asked myself the same question when Jellenek first used the phrase to me. You see the new Stuka version Model 1943 is being fitted with a seventy-five-millimetre cannon.’

  ‘So that’s what all the fuss and secrecy down at the flight line has been all about, Kurt?’

  ‘Exactly, my ancient friend,’ von Igel said with a grin. ‘And now we are being given the great honour of being the first squadron to try the idea out.’

  ‘How exactly?’

  ‘Instead of the old business of falling out of the sky and frightening the pants off the enemy — and probably several of the pilots too, to judge from some of the piss-poor aerial-jockeys we have been receiving of late — now we stand off the target at a safe distance, ready to bolt for cover the minute enemy fighters appear, and blast them to hell-and-back with the 75 mm.’

  ‘Artillery of the air!’ the Met officer exclaimed with delight. ‘Now I understand.’

  ‘Hurrah.’

  ‘But what has all this got to do with weather, Kurt?’

  Suddenly von Igel’s face was sombre and the older man could clearly see the lines of stress and worry around his eyes that came from being subjected to almost unbearable strain and pressure too often. ‘The Fuhrer has ordered we make contact with Peiper at dawn and give him cover as soon as the Popovs locate his break-out column which undoubtedly they will do once it’s light enough to see.’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Nothing is impossible for the Black Eagles. Remember our squadron motto — Kings of the Sky — old man?’ The Met officer grunted, unimpressed.

  ‘Come on, give, old man. What’s it going to be like for the next ten hours?’

  ‘Bloody. Force twelve winds on the Beaumont scale. Heavy snowfall. Dense low cloud,’ the Met officer answered gloomily.

  ‘Can’t you make my day for me with a slight earthquake and a couple of thunderstorms or something?’ the handsome young CO quipped, but there was no humour in his light-blue eyes. ‘Is it really that bad?’

  ‘Worse.’

  For a moment or two they both stood there, while the wind howled outside.

  ‘Er, what chance have we of the storm letting up?’ the CO finally broke the heavy tense silence.

  The Met officer bent over his charts for a moment and then did some rapid calculations on his pad. He looked up. ‘You’ve got one chance in a million that it might just let up for a while — perhaps an hour and a half at the most, just after dawn. Then the new front’ll come in and the shit’ll begin flying once more.’

  Von Igel forced a grin and buttoned up his fur coat. ‘Well, that’ll have to be it then,’ he announced.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Our only chance. I’m alerting the crews to stand by for zero five hundred hours.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ the Met officer exploded.

  ‘Sure,’ von Igel replied with more confidence than he felt. ‘Only crazy men would fly the Stuka in the first place. We’re all meschugge in the Black Eagles. Bye...’

  And with that he was gone out into the raging storm outside, leaving the Met officer to stare at the swinging do
or, his tired eyes wide with disbelief.

  *

  Now, despite the raging storm and fierce wind which shook the sixty-ton Panthers as if they were children’s toys, the Soviet lines were wild with activity. Flares rose into the white-whirling sky, cannon erupted and searchlights poked their icy fingers into the snowstorm trying to tear it apart.

  Schulze, freezing like the rest of the tankers, knew that something had gone wrong. The Popovs had reacted too fast, as if they had been expecting the Germans to do something. An alarming question flashed through his mind. Did they already know that Peiper and the halftracks had broken out? Next instant he decided that couldn’t be; otherwise he would have seen the tell-tale flashes of a firefight, even through the white fog of the snowstorm. No, they had fooled the Popovs that the town was still fully occupied. But they obviously did expect something. Now the big problem was — how long would they wait before they moved in to discover what the cause of the racket was?

  A shell howled across no-man’s land and exploded a hundred metres away from Schulze’s tank, splitting the raging white wall of snow apart with a burst of yellow flame.

  Matz’s voice crackled across the air waves, ‘Hey, you Schulze, that was close. Over!’

  ‘You get yer share of it. Over!’

  ‘But what we gonna do?’ Matz protested as yet another enemy shell straddled the Panthers’ positions. ‘You can see they’re ranging in on us. Over!’

  ‘Go and piss in yer boot,’ Schulze snarled, knowing that his running-mate was correct. ‘They can’t see a hand in front of their eyes in this weather. Over!’

  ‘Then they’re doing shittingly well all right for blind-men, that’s all I can say. Over!’

  ‘Over and out!’ Impatiently Schulze clicked off the ‘receive’ switch. He needed peace and silence to think the thing out.

  Peiper had been gone fifteen minutes or more and as the enemy fire was being directed at their own positions, it was clear that although they obviously knew the defenders were up to something, they still had not tumbled to the fact that the Peiper group had escaped. But how long would it be before they started sending out patrols to probe the German defence perimeter? In this hellish weather, a whole battalion of Popovs could be out there and he wouldn’t be able to see them.