by Leo Kessler
They needed no urging. Like a pack of frightened mice they scurried for the cover of the rain-filled drainage ditch, blocked by the bloated body of a dead cow, lying there with its legs sticking upwards like a tethered balloon. The SS men followed, running to their sixty-ton steel monsters. The long hooded cannon swung round. Hatch covers were dropped. The twin air-cooled machine guns focused on the Ami infantry.
The enemy barrage covering the advancing Shermans crept closer and closer. Two hundred metres. One fifty. One hundred metres!
‘Stand fast!’ von Dodenburg rapped over the command tank’s mike. ‘Here it comes!’
As the stubble-hoppers pressed themselves ever deeper into the mud of the stinking drainage ditch, the enemy barrage descended upon the wood in which the Wotan tanks were hidden with an elemental roar. Tree bursts, von Dodenburg noted automatically. The Amis thought they were faced only by infantry. He smiled coldly in spite of the earth-shaking thunder crack and howl of red-hot slivers of steel striking against the Tiger’s metal sides. The Amis were soon going to be in for an unpleasant surprise.
In the drainage ditch, the stubble-hoppers screamed, sobbed and sweated with fear as the shrapnel whizzed over their heads. Meier felt his bowels open. Hot liquid ran down his legs. The air was filled with a disgusting stench.
‘Holy God in heaven,’ he screamed, ‘let it end … please.’ The next instant, his wish was granted. A hunk of gleaming metal sliced his head off neatly, sending it rolling to the bottom of the ditch, complete with issue glasses.
Next to him Rausch felt the hot vomit well up into his mouth. While the severed head seemed to watch him with unruffled calm through the glasses, Lieutenant Rausch retched violently.
And then the barrage had moved on, leaving the wood full of fallen branches hanging from the pines like newly severed limbs. The Amis had not spotted them after all. Colonel von Dodenburg did not hesitate. The Amis were completely out in the open.
‘What a sight for the gods, Schulze,’ he cried enthusiastically, ‘a whole Ami battalion lined up as if they were on parade and not a bit of cover within the nearest two hundred metres!’ Thrusting back the hatch-cover, sending the shrapnel lying on it flying, he drew out the Very pistol and fired in the same instant.
The red signal flare hissed into the morning sky and hung there for what seemed an age, bathing the battlefield in its unreal, flickering light. Then it started to sink down to earth again. It was the signal that the thirty gunners of Battle Group Wotan had been waiting for ever since they had taken up their positions two hours before. The great 88 mm cannon crashed into action as one. The first Ami company advancing down the slope ran right into the salvo. They disappeared, as if they had been brushed aside by a gigantic hand. Still the tanks came on, attempting vainly to steer their way through the sudden holes and the great piles of khaki-clad dead.
Von Dodenburg, standing upright on the turret of the Royal Tiger, glasses focused on the slaughter, fired the second flare with his free hand. The wood was bathed a sickly green. The gunners reacted at once. They thrust home the AP shells which the signal demanded.
The 88s thundered again. The white blobs sped towards the Shermans, curving slightly and growing faster at every moment. Suddenly the Ami tank-drivers realised they had run into a trap. Desperately they tried to avoid the armour-piercing shells, but in vain. A couple of Shermans smashed into each other as their drivers panicked. Another swung round in a cloud of mud and pebbles and ploughed into the following infantry, cutting a great swathe through the screaming GIs.
Metal struck metal with a hollow boom. The first Sherman came to an abrupt halt. Its 75-mm gun sank suddenly like the falling head of a dying animal. Another rocked as if in a great storm as it was struck too, and thick white smoke started to pour from its engine. Evil little flames licked the paint off its metal sides. With a roar, the Sherman disappeared in a blinding yellow light. When the SS men looked again, the Ami tank had vanished completely save for one lonely boogie wheel sailing slowly through the air.
But they had no time for the uncanny sights of the battlefield. Most of the cover Shermans had been hit and were burning fiercely now as their terrified crews made frantic attempts to get out of the escape hatches before their ‘ronsons’ exploded for good.2 They turned their attention to the infantry.
The 7.62 twin machine guns started to chatter. A stream of green and white tracer winged its way towards the Amis. Some threw themselves on to the ground and von Dodenburg could see the bullets striking their defenceless bodies over and over again. Others tried to run and were caught in mid-stride, throwing up their arms in extravagant gestures, spines arched in exquisite agony before they were thrown into the mud by the remorseless stream of lead. But mostly they just cowered there behind the burning Shermans, allowing themselves to be slaughtered.
Then from the other side of the height came the soft plops, followed seconds later by the howl of the Ami 3-inch mortars. Bombs exploded everywhere in front of the trapped infantry, pouring thick grey smoke, masking the Amis from the German gunners. One by one the machine-guns ceased their deadly chatter. Finally von Dodenburg fired his last flare – the signal for ceasefire.
He grabbed the plug-in mike at the side of command tank’s turret and cried urgently, ‘To all gunners – cease fire. Do you read me – cease fire now! We’ve got a long war in front of us, boys, and we’ll need all the ammo we can lay our shitty fingers on!’
Standing beside him on the turret, his face blackened by cannonfire, Schulze laughed. ‘You can say that again, sir! We’ll still be fighting this war when we’ve all been long in hell.’
Von Dodenburg laughed bitterly. ‘Hell, Schulze? Why hell is too good a place for the men of Wotan!’
Half an hour later, the Amis had retreated over the height back into Belgium; the only sign that they had ever dared to approach German soil were the still burning Shermans on the hillside and the muddy field littered with their khaki-clad dead. Swiftly von Dodenburg re-organised the shattered stubble-hoppers into the semblance of a defence force. Arming them with whatever weapons they could pick up from the Amis and allowing them to loot the dead for Hershey bars, Camel cigarettes and all the other luxuries with which the Amis always seemed equipped, he ordered them back to their original positions on the height. But he knew they would break again under the next US attack unless they were more frightened of him than of the enemy. An example had to be made.
‘One which will frighten them shitless, Schulze,’ he explained to the Wotan’s senior NCO, ‘so that they’d rather allow the Amis to shoot their eggs off than face me for running away.’
He ordered that the stubble-hoppers’ CO be brought to him, a senior lieutenant with one arm and his dirty mud-stained tunic covered with the ‘tin’ of five years of war.
‘You’ve been around, I see,’ the SS officer said. ‘Narvik Medal, the Frozen Flesh Order,3 Wound Medal in Silver, Bronze Combat Badge, Sevastapol Medal. Hm. But why didn’t you try to stop your men running away?’
Rausch stared blankly at the handsome, black-clad SS colonel, who looked as if he had just stepped out of one of those Armed SS recruiting posters which one saw everywhere in the battered Third Reich these days.
Patiently, von Dodenburg repeated his question. Still the infantry officer did not answer. His mind was full of Meier’s headless body and the bespectacled head staring up at him from the bloody rainwater at the bottom of the ditch. Von Dodenburg drew back his hand and slapped the infantry man squarely across the face. It wasn’t a hard blow, but it had the desired effect. The stubble-hopper shook his head, as if he were just coming out of a trance.
‘What did you say?’ he asked thickly through vomit-caked dry lips.
‘I asked you why you didn’t try to stop your men from running away?’
The stubble-hopper shrugged.
Von Dodenburg hit him again. This time harder. A thin trickle of blood flowed from his right nostril and his eyes were suddenly liquid with pain. ‘I can se
e that this is the only method of talking with you, Lieutenant. I asked you a question – please be good enough to answer it. Why?’
‘Why? Everyone knows why, Colonel. Just look around you.’ He waved a dirty hand at the survivors of his battalion. ‘Old men from the stomach battalions and young kids from the Hitler Youth who are still wet behind the spoons. You can’t fight with such material.’ He pressed his worn face closer to von Dodenburg. ‘Believe me, you can’t fight a war with that kind of man. The army’s finished and the war’s over for Germany—’ He broke off abruptly, as von Dodenburg swung round, leaving him standing there.
‘Schwarz,’ he bellowed. ‘Major Schwarz, to me at once!’
His adjutant, a one-armed dark-haired major with burning, crazy eyes pushed his way through the crowd of gaping SS troopers watching their CO ‘making a sow’ of this pig of a stubble-hopper.
‘Sir,’ he snapped, coming to attention as if he were back on the parade ground of the SS Officer Academy at Bad Toelz. ‘At your command!’
‘Get a detail with a rope, Schwarz, and take care of this matter. The officer in question has been found guilty of cowardice under fire, defeatism and lack of moral fibre. The sentence is death by hanging. You will execute it immediately.’
‘Sir!’
There was a gasp of horror from the stubble-hoppers. But there was no expression on Rausch’s face. He accepted his fate, as if he had been expecting it all along.
Five minutes later, Rausch was hanging from the nearest tree, his tongue protruding from his purple lips, his eyes bulging from their sockets, his worn grey breeches wet where he had evacuated his bladder with the intense pain. A rough-and-ready placard hung from his neck, reading: ‘I was a defeatist and coward. I have suffered a just fate. Let this be a warning to all defeatists and cowards.’ Now he swung back and forth gently in the morning wind, while the stubble-hoppers stared up at their former CO in wide-eyed horror. Von Dodenburg took a last look at them. He was satisfied that they would hold now, whatever the Amis cared to throw at them. But still one couldn’t be too sure.
‘Just to make certain that your patriotic fervour will not diminish during my absence elsewhere,’ he said, ‘Officer-Cadet Krause here will have orders to shoot the culprit out of hand.’ He pointed to the skinny cadet, whose black tunic was already adorned with the Iron Cross and the Wound Medal in Silver, despite his seventeen years.
Krause grinned cheekily and toyed with his Walther pistol significantly.
‘But,’ von Dodenburg added, ‘I’m quite sure now that you have all seen the errors of your previous conduct and will never again allow the Amis to set foot on the sacred soil of the Reich.’ He swung round to his hard-faced, waiting veterans. ‘Mount up!’ he yelled at the top of his voice.
With the skill acquired in months and years of practice, the black-clad men of Wotan clambered easily on to their vehicles and swung into their positions.
‘Start up!’ von Dodenburg waved his arm in a great circle.
Schulze passed him his goggles. Hurriedly he pulled them down over his eyes, as all along the edge of the shattered wood, the great 360-hp engines burst into crazy life, sending metre-long streams of purple flame from their twin exhausts. The air was suddenly full of the acrid stench of diesel.
‘Move off!’ von Dodenburg yelled and grabbed the turret ring as his own Royal Tiger started to rattle forward.
Behind him the rest of the sixty-ton monsters began to follow suit. The stubble-hoppers scattered out of the way as the broad steel tracks showered them with mud and pebbles. But Colonel von Dodenburg had no further eyes for them. His hard, embittered gaze was fixed on the round gleaming tower of the church in the far distance. Aachen’s cathedral, in which the bones of the great Charlemagne, the father of Germany’s glory, were housed: the bones of the Frankish warrior who had made the border city, which now stood squarely in the path of the Ami armies, a holy place for all Germans. Suddenly that old fervent belief in the righteousness of Germany’s cause swept over von Dodenburg. He thought it had been destroyed in him completely by his knowledge of the corruption and defeatism of some of the powerful men who ran the Third Reich in this fifth year of war. But now he felt as he had in those heady victorious days of 1940, as a young lieutenant, when it had seemed that nothing could stop a reborn, revitalised Germany from conquering Europe and, with its bright new National Socialist creed, give a new lease of life to a tired old continent.
As his eager young veterans of Battle Group Wotan in their great tanks swung into line behind him and began to rattle towards the city to which the Führer himself had ordered them, Colonel Kuno von Dodenburg promised himself grimly that no enemy soldier would ever set foot in Holy Aachen.
Notes
1. Fighter planes used as dive-bombers.
2. i.e. Ronson lighter. Because the 30-ton Sherman was easily set on fire, it was nicknamed the ‘ronson’ by its disgusted crews.
3. Award given to German soldiers who had taken part in the terrible Russian winter campaign of 41–42.
THREE
‘Heil Hitler!’
The tall, emaciated man standing at the shattered window of the Aachen Battle HQ, dressed in the black uniform of an SS Police General, did not react to the new ‘Hitler Greeting,’ which everyone in the Wehrmacht had been forced to use instead of the traditional salute since the abortive July Putsch.1
Colonel von Dodenburg looked inquiringly at Schwarz to his right and then at Schulze to his left. Schulze tapped his right temple in silence, as if the Police General’s silence was yet another symptom of Donner’s well-known craziness.
‘So you too think I haven’t got all my cups in the cupboard, Sergeant-Major?’ General Donner asked tonelessly, still not turning round to face the three Wotan men. He laughed, humourlessly. ‘Do not feel embarrassed. You are in a goodly company, including that of the greatest captain of all times.2 Who else but a crazy man would take over the command of the defence of a place like Aachen 1 It’s a one-way ticket to heaven, isn’t it – or, perhaps better, hell?’
Then von Dodenburg realised how the General had seen Schulze’s disrespectful gesture. A small mirror was attached to the window in front of him.
‘Ah, my dear Colonel, you’ve spotted it – my little trick eh? Very necessary in the Third Reich in this year of 1944, believe you me. It is a wise person who knows what is going on behind his back and takes precautions accordingly. Like this!’ Donner’s foot shot out. He pressed a brass button let into the floor. The next instant a great opaque sheet of what looked like glass crashed down from the ceiling and formed a barrier between the three soldiers and the man at the window. ‘Bullet-proof glass, gentlemen,’ Donner said, amused at the shock on their faces. ‘A little trick of mine, which usually impresses my visitors. And it does take the edge off the initial impact of this handsome mug of mine.’
In that same instant he turned and von Dodenburg gasped with horror. The General was a mutilated monster. Half his face had been shot away, a glass eye fixed for ever in a stiff unwinking stare in the livid pink hole. His mouth was a thin mauve line without lips in which the great false teeth were visible right to their bright red plastic gums. With a shell-shattered arm from which the hand hung like a withered black talon, Donner gestured towards his ruined face. ‘The Ukraine in forty-two, gentlemen. Partisan attack. Forty thousand Ivans had gone up the chimney that year.3 The cost? Very low. I was made into a monster whose own wife has screaming fits when her husband feels one of those nasty male urges and is forced to remind her of her marital obligations.’
Colonel von Dodenburg pulled himself together with difficulty. ‘Colonel von Dodenburg reporting obediently for duty,’ he snapped, using the traditional address. ‘Battle Group Wotan under command. Fifteen hundred effectives. Thirty Tigers presently in position. The panzer grenadier element following on foot from Dueren. Sir!’
General Donner waved him to stand at ease and sized the handsome young SS officer up for a few moments before speak
ing. ‘I have heard a great deal of the Wotan. Even we rear-echelon stallions sometimes take a little interest in the activities of you front swine. The capture of Eben Emael in forty – now I’m afraid in Ami hands, if my Intelligence is not mistaken. The surprise crossing of the River Bug in forty-one at the beginning of Barbarossa.4 Russia and then Cassino this year. An impressive record. No wonder they call the Wotan the Führer’s Fire Brigade, sent wherever there is a blaze.’
‘We are no different from the rest of the formation, sir,’ von Dodenburg said while Schwarz nodded his agreement. ‘We share the same spirit. It is just that my men are more experienced than those in other SS units.’
Donner swung round on him stiffly and von Dodenburg could see that his ruined body was supported by some kind, of metal corset underneath the immaculate black uniform. ‘My dear Colonel, I hear a lot of rubbish talked about the spirit of the SS. I shit on the spirit of the SS!’
Schwarz, the fanatical Nazi, who had been turned nearly crazy by the discovery that he was half Jew, looked shocked. But the Police General went on.
‘They are as good or as bad, as corrupt or as loyal, as the rest of our nation is in this fifth year of war.’
‘Corrupt, sir?’ von Dodenburg queried, avoiding Donner’s glassy stare.
‘Don’t try to fool me, Colonel! I may be a little crazy, but I’m not that crazy. You know and I know that our system is rotten. Since July everybody can’t help but notice it. Even in the ranks of black elite there are those who are paid to betray their corps, their folk comrades, their very nation to save their precious skins or positions.’ The bitter tone went out of his metallic voice which, like his face and body, seemed yet another artificial product of the military surgeons in Berlin. ‘That is why I asked the Reich Main Security Office5 for your formation, von Dodenburg. My dear Colonel I have not been a police officer for most of my life for nothing, you know.’ He tapped the withered black claw on the sheaf of papers lying on his desk and at the same moment pressed the button which sent his safety device shooting back into the ceiling. ‘I have all I need to know about you and your men in these documents.’
