Blood and Ice

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Put yer backs into it!’ Schulze yelled, as the troopers took the strain. They heaved. The halftrack moved forward a little more, its rear tracks throwing up a shower of stone and snow. Another lurch. Abruptly the track hit ice or hard-packed snow. The vehicle lost traction. The tracks whirled furiously, the Hawk gunning the engine all out.

  ‘Pass op!’ one of the men on the sides yelled in panic.

  The Dutchmen jumped clear as the halftrack began to swing to one side,

  ‘Get back there, you Cheeseheads!’ Schulze cried in dismay, as the men scattered out of the path of the vehicle which was sliding sideways towards the edge of the road, the Hawk fighting the wheel crazily.

  Schulze jumped out of its path just as Habicht regained control of the halftrack, preventing it from sliding that last couple of paces on the treacherous granulated snow.

  ‘Get out, sir!’ Schulze yelled from where he lay sprawled in the snow. ‘Let it go over the side. The bastard’s not worth –’

  The words died on his lips. Quite deliberately the Hawk rammed home first gear again. Gently, very gently, he let out the clutch, the engine whining in protest as he did so. The halftrack lurched forward again. Schulze held his breath. If it slipped now, the Hawk would not have a chance. His face showed no fear, just anger that this piece of metal would not obey his commands. He increased his pressure on the accelerator, thick clouds of blue smoke pouring from the halftrack’s exhaust. Still the vehicle did not respond. Schulze watched, his mouth wide open, his heart beating frantically in an onslaught of panic. Would he do it?

  Suddenly the track caught. Habicht did not hesitate. He swung the wheel a half turn to the left. For a moment he thought he had done the wrong thing. Desperately he gave the vehicle more power. The halftrack jolted forward. He swung the wheel round. The tracks answered readily. A moment later he was away from the danger of the mountainside, the vehicle righted and pointing up the slope once again.

  On the ground, Schulze breathed out hard. The Hawk might be out to kill them, with his blind belief in Germany’s cause, but he was a damned brave man all the same.

  But there was no time for congratulations. For in that same instant that Habicht sprang lightly from the halftrack’s cab as if nothing special had occurred, there was the faint throb of a light aeroplane’s motor, increasing by the second, coming towards them from the east.

  ‘It’s a sewing machine all right,’1Kreuz said, shading his eyes against the angled yellow glare of the dying sun.

  Crouched behind the cover of the leading halftrack, the Hawk and Schulze watched the little biplane coming ever closer to their positions. ‘With a bit of luck, Schulze,’ Habicht said, ‘he might not spot us. It’s already getting dark and those firs up there cast quite a bit of shadow over the road.’

  A moment later the Rata was over them, trailing a gigantic black shadow behind it over the snow. Swiftly the two men rolled over and saw it disappear over the nearest peak. Habicht breathed out a sigh of relief. ‘The Red didn’t –’ He stopped short. Behind the peak there was the sound of the little reconnaissance plane turning. ‘It’s coming back!’

  ‘He’s spotted us!’ Schulze cried in alarm. ‘You flak gunners get on to him!’

  Desperately the crew of the quadruple flak, mounted on one of the halftracks, scrambled for their gun, just as the Rata appeared from behind the mountain, coming in very low. At a hundred metres, it began to fly the length of the column, while the frantic-fingered gunners fumbled with their gun. Angrily, Schulze let fly with a futile burst from his Schmeisser. Suddenly the four slim barrels of the 20mm flak opened up with a tremendous burst. White tracer slit the blue sky furiously. The Russian pilot reacted at once. His speed rose as he opened up the throttle. Suddenly he banked to the left, leaving the angry stream of shells to hiss by him harmlessly, some twenty metres away and a moment later he was gone, leaving the furious sweating gunners firing purposely at the empty sky.

  The firing died away and there was no sound save the soft throb of the plane’s engine to the east, getting fainter by the second.

  Schulze broke the silence: ‘Looks to me like trouble, sir. If they can’t come on up after us because of the road block, they can plant a nasty surprise for us at the other end now they definitely know we’re here.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right, Schulze,’ the Hawk said a little wearily. ‘But we’ll face up to that particular problem when we come to it. Tell the men to mount up again, would you please?’

  But before long Sergeant Major Schulze was going to be proved wrong, very seriously wrong indeed.

  Note

  1. German soldier’s name for the Rata reconnaissance plane, given to it because of the noise its engine made.

  FIVE

  ‘Helmets on!’ Major Suslov barked above the roar of the towing plane.

  Suslov, a tall dark officer in his late twenties, looked along the dim, green-lit length of the big glider and nodded his approval. His Grey Eagles, not one of them over twenty-five and virtually every one of them decorated in combat, looked fit and confident in spite of the terrible danger of their bold mission.

  ‘Check equipment!’ he snapped.

  With the precision of machines, each man turned to his neighbour and checked his equipment – Machine pistol, ammunition, grenades, smoke and high explosive, pistol, emergency rations – before reporting ‘All correct’.

  ‘Comrade Major.’ Suslov turned. It was the young glider pilot, who like all the pilots in the Grey Eagle Battalion had been a pre-war Soviet champion in the Komosol Youth Movement.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The tugs are preparing to drop the tow now.’

  Suslov swung round and faced his men. ‘Prepare for landing!’ he ordered.

  Veterans that they were, the young men adopted the landing posture – hands clasping the metal spars behind their heads, feet raised slightly from the floor – immediately. There was a light tug. The glider shuddered slightly as the pilot brought up the nose in order to brake. Suddenly there was silence as the towing plane broke off in a great curve and began heading back east. All noise died away. The January dawn seemed suddenly unbelievably calm and peaceful. Now the Grey Eagles could do nothing but wait and rely on the pilot to put them down safely on the difficult terrain.

  Major Suslov had been instrumental in setting up the first experimental glider company of paratroop volunteers, from which the Grey Eagles had sprung. From the war against Finland right through the terrible battles against the Germans in ’41 and ’42 on to the great victories of the last two years, the Grey Eagles had always been in the forefront of the action. Time and time again the Battalion had been decimated in some desperate action behind enemy lines, but always there had been more than enough volunteers to fill its empty ranks again. Suslov and his Grey Eagles were, after all, the idols of Soviet youth. Had not Stalin publicly embraced Suslov at a Kremlin reception in front of the newsreel cameras and called him ‘the boldest of the bold?’

  Suslov, however, was not a reckless commander. It was only because of the desperate situation of Zacharov’s Guards Army that he had allowed himself to be talked into landing his Eagles on the most difficult type of terrain possible – the mountains.

  Anxiously he pushed his way down the littered gangway to where Boris, a flaxen-haired Ukrainian crouched over the controls, swinging the glider round in a huge circle to lower its speed, prior to landing.

  On the western horizon the darkness was breaking up, turning to the threatening opaque grey, which he knew was snow falling far away. But Suslov had not eyes for the horizon. His gaze was fixed on the ground below, it looked far from promising. Long stretches of dark green, which were firs, broken at regular intervals by sharp, naked peaks. ‘What do you think Boris?’ he asked, after glancing upwards to check that the rest of the Battalion’s gliders were there.

  ‘It’s not good,’ the pilot answered, not taking his eyes from his controls.

  Suslov could see the faint line of sweat fri
nging the pilot’s hairline and knew that if one of the Soviet Union’s most experienced pilots was beginning to sweat, they were in for trouble.

  Boris straightened the big glider. There was no sound now save the hiss of the wind, as the glider came down at speed. The nose-dive brakes were applied and the fuselage trembled violently. The ground loomed up ever larger, steep and littered with what seemed gigantic snowballs. ‘Boulders!’ Boris cried in alarm.

  ‘Crash landing!’ Suslov yelled back into the plane. The Grey Eagles tensed their bodies, but their young faces showed no fear.

  The ground was racing by them now at a tremendous speed. Boris flung up the nose and the next instant, two thousand pounds of glider and men hit the snowy slope. Snow sprayed up on both sides of them higher than the cockpit, in a blinding white stream. Wood and canvas splintered and tore. The barbed wire they had wrapped around the skids to shorten the breaking distance snapped like bits of wet string as it hit the boulders concealed beneath the snow. The skids squeaked shrilly, as the glider slewed towards the edge of a precipice. Boris, fighting the controls frantically, brought the glider round just in time. The glider slithered away, lurched against a huge boulder and came to an abrupt stop.

  ‘Good man, Boris,’ Suslov cried and slapped him on the back. ‘All right, my Eagles – out,’ he yelled.

  At once the glider’s interior was transformed into a frenzy of movement. The Eagles sprang to their feet. With their heavy boots, those who were too far from the open door smashed through the canvas, as they had been trained to do, and stumbled out into the cold dawn air, to form a defensive perimeter.

  Suslov checked his positions and stared up at the sky. The others were coming in now, ten gliders bearing the rest of the Battalion. The first one hissed over his head. It came into a perfect landing, nose held high, brakes screaming in shrill protest as it shrieked to a stop in a gleaming white flurry of snow. An instant later his Eagles came tumbling out. The second one followed closely but number three hit the ground hard and began to slide across the hard-packed snow. Brakes screaming all out, trailing a great wake of snow behind it, the glider shot helplessly over the edge of the precipice and fell over one thousand metres, a broken-off wing falling behind it to its death like a lone leaf.

  All the others landed safely after this disaster. The Grey Eagles had pulled off the most difficult landing in the history of gliderborne operations. They had landed on a snow-covered mountain range, some five thousand metres above sea level!

  ‘It looks as if we’ll go down in the history books after the war, Comrade Major,’ Boris commented as the Grey Eagles began to form up.

  Major Suslov looked up from his map for a moment, and grinned. ‘We’ve got to survive it first, Boris.’

  Thirty minutes later, the men of the Soviet Union’s élite unit had disappeared into the firs on their way to their confrontation with SS Regiment Europa. Soon the battle of the giants would begin.

  SIX

  As the morning of the second day in the mountains progressed, the snow steadily began to fall more thickly. The wind increased too. Now the long line of vehicles, crawling through the Vértes Mountains, battled against a veritable blizzard, the lookouts’ faces stung by the flying snow, their eyebrows white with the bitter crystals. The road ran through steep-sided gorges, its edge hanging vertiginously over the valley below.

  Despite the treacherous conditions Obersturmbannführer Habicht was exceedingly pleased. It was over fifteen hours since the little Russian reconnaissance plane had spotted them. By now he could have expected the first Red attack from the air. But in this weather the Reds would not be able to fly. And even if they could, their pilots would have a devil of a job spotting the convoy on this particular stretch of the road, with the great sheer mountain side giving them the cover they need.

  ‘You look very pleased with yourself, Obersturmbannführer,’ Kreuz remarked, cleaning the snow off his monocle, and wishing himself in Berlin with a glass of steaming hot grog.

  ‘I am,’ Habicht replied ‘In spite of the weather we are making excellent time. Another day, in my estimation, and we should be through the mountains. Then the road to Budapest should be wide open for us.’

  ‘Providing that the Viking and Death’s Head keep up their attack-schedule,’ Kreuz objected mildly.

  ‘But they are, my dear Kreuz,’ Habicht answered. He indicated the chattering command radio at the back of the halftrack, with its freezing operator crouched over it. ‘Division signalled an hour ago that the Viking is making progress all along the front. The first day went splendidly and we’re doing just as well today. We caught the Reds with their pants well and truly down yesterday.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Kreuz said with hollow enthusiasm.

  ‘Besides,’ Habicht continued, ‘even if the Division weren’t making such splendid progress, I would go on.’

  Kreuz looked at him aghast. ‘Alone?’

  ‘Alone,’ Habicht echoed, a faint smile on his thin lips. ‘You see we are a symbol, we of the Europa.’ He paused moment airily, as if he were first having to convince himself of the truth of what he was about to say. ‘And sometimes symbols are more effective when those who create them are…are dead, don’t you think?’

  Kreuz shivered. Now he knew the Hawk was insane.

  Otto Habicht had decided on that day in the peaceful little SS Cavalry Hospital in Heidelberg that he was not going to survive the war. He had done so quietly and completely undramatically in the stillness of the big summer-white room, with the only sound of the barges on the Neckar outside to disturb the sterile hospital calm. It had not been the loss of his lower leg which had caused him to come to his overwhelming decision. It had been the other thing.

  SS Oberstabsarzt Phelps had broken it gently to him when he felt the sudden strangeness between his legs after the three day series of operations on his lower body. At first, he had hidden his terrible revelation behind medical terminology:

  ‘Wounds in the scrotal sack…inguinal canal…removal of sin and dex…’ Habicht had interrupted him coldly: ‘Have you taken my balls off, doctor?’

  Numbly Phelps had nodded.

  ‘Am I a eunuch now?’

  ‘Yes, both dex and sin – I mean right and left testicles were irreparably injured by the mortar burst which took off your lower leg. I’m afraid there was nothing else I could do…’ his voice had tailed away. There was nothing more he could say to the man lying on the simple white bed in front of him.

  Habicht had thanked him gravely for saving his life, asked him to leave and considered the situation as any other military problem, weighing the pros and cons, considering the possibilities – the inability to marry, the inevitable accumulation of more and more fat, the increasingly high-pitched voice, the female instability of the eunuch. He had come to his decision. Before the war ended, he would die – grandly – in some desperate bold venture at the head of his men as befitted a Habicht, whose family had served Prussia since the days of the Great Frederick himself. Now as his regiment ground its way ever higher into the Vértes Mountains, Colonel Habicht knew this was that desperate, bold venture he had promised himself.

  The Grey Eagles had been climbing steadily for over three hours, plodding upwards in strained silence, weighed down with thirty kilos of equipment per man. There was no sound, save the squeak of their frozen boots on the packed snow and sharp exhalations of breath.

  But ahead of them Suslov knew they were coming to the end of their march. Before them the key height, which dominated the mountain road, loomed ever larger. He had chosen it because of its excellent strategic position. Behind it to the north, there was a sheer rockwall. To the east and south it was bounded by a ravine, narrow but very deep. In both directions there was an excellent field of fire. To the west, it overlooked the road the Fritzes must take if they were to break out of the mountains. From the point of view of defence, the height could not have been better situated. Once established on top of it, a handful of men, well dug-in and dete
rmined, could hold off an army.

  Suslov knew his men needed a rest badly – they had been going with only one ten minute stop since the drop – but he knew too he could not let them halt. They had to be in position on the height before the Fritzes arrived. ‘Grey Eagles,’ he cried, feeling the icy mountain air stab at his lungs like a sharp knife, ‘at the double! ‘He pumped his clenched fist up and down twice swiftly: the infantry signal for ‘at the double’.

  Eyes glazed, yet determined, the paras stumbled after him.

  Obersturmbannführer Habicht also looked eagerly towards the gleaming white peak, knowing that it was the highest point in the Vértes. Once it was passed, the going would be downhill, a straight run to the floor of the valley and the vital road network beyond.

  He urged on his column, taking risks on the surface of the mountain road, which he would not have dared to that morning. ‘Tempo…tempo,’ he barked over and over again into the radio which linked him with Schulze’s VW jeep. ‘Get those men moving, Sarnt-Major!’

  Schulze hurried the rest of the convoy along like an angry sheepdog, switching in and out of the ponderous halftracks with the little jeep, taking appalling risks as he wheeled back and forth. At his side, a fearful Chink, his face now a sickly green, could do nothing but close his slant eyes and groan, ‘Sarnt-Major, you think Hamburg, eh, and fucki-fucki shop after big war!’

  Habicht’s tactics paid off. Even the hard-pressed young drivers, virtually exhausted by the terrible conditions through which they had been forced to drive these last thirty-six hours, seemed to be infected by the Commander’s enthusiasm. They, too, started handling the clumsy dangerous half tracks, as if they were light racing cars, accelerating just before they came to a bend, changing down with a crash – right across the gated gear box – and swinging round it with only the merest tap on the brake pedal, ignoring the frightening swing of the vehicle’s rump towards the off-side edge of the mountain road and the awesome drop.