by Leo Kessler
‘Krause,’ von Dodenburg snapped over the radio. ‘We shall open up in a moment. Enemy armoured car to our front – two o’clock. See it?’
‘Yessir.’
‘As soon as we do, hit the Ami flank up there. We’ll do the same to the right. Once we open up, move forward. Through that stream and right into them.’
In spite of being a veteran, Krause could not conceal his excitement. ‘Christ, sir, this is going to be like Panzer7 Meyer at Caen when he tackled a whole British tank brigade with one Tiger!’
Von Dodenburg sniffed. ‘Well, he’s a general and generals are allowed to do such things. Let’s hope we’re as lucky.’ He pulled down the hatch and dropped into the leather seat next to Schulze. The lid slammed shut with the hollow ring of finality. ‘All right, Schulze, fire at will!’
Schulze squeezed the firing bar carefully. The great gun reared at his shoulder. The Tiger shuddered as the flame blazed from the 88’s muzzle.
‘Right on, Schulze!’ Matz yelled excitedly, as the Tiger moved forward, ‘got him right up the arse!’
Five hundred metres away the Ami Staghound halted as if it had run into a brick wall. Sparks were showering along the length of its motor cowling. As it burst into flame, an Ami hurled himself out, his uniform ablaze. Twice he rolled over in the mud, arms threshing wildly. Then he was still.
‘Exit the reconnaissance element,’ von Dodenburg said. ‘The first act is over. The second can begin.’
The first Sherman got off its shell quicker than Schulze. Its 75-mm belched orange flame. A shell ricocheted off the Tiger’s thick front armour. The turret was suddenly full of a burnt-cinder stench. Schulze ducked instinctively and cursed with surprise.
‘What’s up, Sergeant-Major?’ Matz’s voice came over the intercom mockingly. ‘A bit of wind gone up yer drawers?’
‘A bit of knuckle sandwich’ll be finding its way into your big gob, if you risk another fat lip like that,’ Schulze growled, fiddling frantically with his dials.
‘Knock it off,’ von Dodenburg broke in. ‘Perhaps you gentlemen may recall we’re fighting a war?’
The next moment Schulze’s gun spoke again. ‘Hit!’ von Dodenburg roared.
A hundred metres away, Krause, keeping pace with the command tank, scored a hit too, bringing a Sherman to a stop, oily black smoke pouring from its shattered turret. The crew tried to escape. But the panzer grenadiers dug in at the side of the road showed no mercy. They mowed them down before they had run five metres. They fell like puppets, suddenly gone crazy, arms and legs flailing in their death agonies. A Sherman burst from the bushes to von Dodenburg’s right. Another came down from the barred road.
‘They’re coming from the flanks, Schulze,’ Matz screamed.
A 75-mm shell slammed into the Royal Tiger’s side. From within they could see the metal glow a dull red for a moment, then the AP whined off with a deafening howl. Schulze fired. From somewhere an Ami machine-gun opened up. Slugs sprayed the hull. One penetrated a gun slit. The eighteen-year-old ‘booty German’ second-driver reeled back, clutching his face, the blood streaming from between his tightly clenched fingers. ‘I can’t see,’ he screamed in his thick, accented German. ‘I can’t see … I’m blinded!’
With surprising gentleness Matz pushed him to one side and continued driving. ‘It’s all right, sir,’ he gasped into the intercom. ‘Everything’s under control … everything’s in butter.’ As the great tank rattled towards the Shermans, the young driver began to die on the shaking blood-soaked seat.
Another AP shell slammed against the Tiger’s thick armour. The sixty-ton monster rocked violently, but the big Maybachs kept running. Schulze fired once – twice in rapid succession. The Sherman on the left flank, stricken, its driver dead at the controls, his head shorn off, barrelled at 30 mph into the road embankment where it exploded a second later. A group of Ami infantry appeared from nowhere.
‘MGs’, von Dodenburg bellowed.
But the infantry did not want to fight. They raised their hands in surrender. Matz pushed aside the dying boy who kept sliding against his shoulder, and put his foot hard down on the gas pedal. The Amis began to scatter. The tank cut into them, remorselessly churning up their defenceless bodies under its broad metal tracks.
Ahead the line of Shermans had come to an uncertain halt beyond the stream. Von Dodenburg knew they would turn and flee if he pressed home his attack; the Ami tankers always did when they were faced by the superior Tiger.
‘Advance – full speed!’ he commanded excitedly, eyes sparkling with the bloodlust of the chase.
Matz crashed his way through the Tiger’s thirty-odd gears. It gathered speed, engines roaring deafeningly. Krause drew parallel. The stream loomed up. Von Dodenburg sized it up swiftly. It didn’t look too deep for the Tigers.
‘Prepare to ford, Matz,’ he ordered. ‘Check watertight seals. Raise the stand-pipe.’
Matz slowed down and guarded the six-metre-long gun carefully over the deep bank. Ahead the Shermans still hesitated. With a thick grunt, it went over. Krause’s Tiger followed suit. Its nose splashed into the water. It went under. The water came up to its deck. Deeper. Now the standpipe only showed above the surface. Von Dodenburg gulped. He always hated this moment. Was the Tiger really watertight? Would the Maybach keep functioning? Would an enemy shell catch them just when they were at their most vulnerable?
Then Matz’s voice reported with complete calm: ‘Everything all right, sir. Vision correct.’
Then the Maybach engine took the extra strain and they were waddling up the steep bank, shaking water everywhere like some amphibious monster ascending from the deep. Von Dodenburg flung back the hatch. Ahead the Shermans were obviously preparing to flee, unnerved by the appearance of the Tiger on their side of the stream. He looked behind him.
‘Krause!’ he gasped.
‘What is it, sir?’ Schulze cried.
‘He’s stuck half way across. I can just see the top of his standpipe. His engine must have flooded.’
‘What are we going to do, sir? Officer-Cadet Krause’s a good soldier – and he’s only seventeen.’
Von Dodenburg hesitated only for a moment. He could imagine Krause’s crew fighting off the water in their armoured coffin, screaming and struggling as the water rose higher in the green gloom. But he couldn’t stop now. The whole front depended upon his breaking the Ami armoured thrust.
‘Move out,’ he rasped. ‘There’s nothing we can do for them now.’
Matz pushed the dead driver to one side and slammed home the start gear. The Tiger began to roll again.
By late afteroon, the lone Royal Tiger had broken the Ami attack and the Second Division’s armour, covering Hobbs’s ‘Butchers’, was streaming back the way it had come, followed by the panic-stricken doughboys.
Von Dodenburg, standing high in the turret of the Tiger, the metal gleaming brightly at a dozen points where it had been struck by Ami 75s, could hardly believe the success of his lone attacks. As they rolled deeper into enemy territory, he knew he should turn back, before Ami air spotted them. But something drove him on despite the risk. ‘Big trap, with nothing behind it,’ he recalled the phrase they had used to describe the typical Berlin big-mouth during his schooldays in the Reich capital. Now he, too, was a ‘big mouth with nothing behind it’: one lone Tiger pitted against an Ami division. Still, their boldness was paying off and every hour he gained for Donner would give the Police General a better chance of getting some sort of provisional front together behind him.
‘Ami dump, sir – four o’clock,’ Matz’s voice came through the headphones, routine and emotionless. He swung round and saw a couple of hastily erected bell-tents, with naked men pouring out of them, towels clutched absurdly to their genitals.
‘Ooh, sweetie, look at all those lovely bottoms,’ Schulze simpered. ‘Worth a fortune if you were a warm brother.’8
Von Dodenburg pressed the trigger of the turret mg. Tracer sprayed the muddy grass outside the shower t
ent. The Amis threw down their towels and galloped across the fields towards the wood in the distance. Von Dodenburg took his finger off the trigger.
‘Let them go,’ he said, laughing. ‘Seems wrong somehow to shoot a man without his clothes on.’
‘I can see you’ll end up in the Salvation Army after all, sir,’ Schulze said. ‘There’s a heart of gold underneath that rough exterior, sir.’
‘And you’ll feel my rough boot up your golden arse, if you’re not careful,’ von Dodenburg said. ‘All right, Matz, stop her. Let’s see what we can inherit from our rich Ami friends.’
The ‘inherited’ a great deal. While Matz dragged out the dead driver and dumped him in a nearby ditch, Schulze looted the shower unit’s kitchen, retrieving a steaming saucepan full of meatballs, corned beef, dried ham and eggs, sardines, tomatoes – the booty of a great pile of cans.
‘Sir, would you like to indulge?’ He pulled another hand from behind his back to reveal a bottle. ‘Firewater – Ami firewater!’
While the dead driver lay in the ditch ten metres away, staring sightlessly into the darkening sky, they tore into the lukewarm food ravenously, washing it down with great swigs from the litre bottle of looted bourbon.
‘Like shitting God in France,’ Matz chortled, spearing a meatball with his combat knife. ‘That’s the way these Amis live! Why oh why wasn’t I born an Ami – with such lovely fodder!’ He touched his oil-stained dirty fingers to his greasy lips, and thrust the meatball into his mouth.
‘Yeah, why? Why should the Reich suffer a bastard like you?’ Schulze dipped his canteen cup into the revolting mixture. ‘Let the Amis have you! Shitting foot and mouth disease you’ve got, Matz. You eat too much and wear out too many boots.’
‘I’ve only got one fucking leg, Sergeant-Major,’ Matz protested. ‘And, by the way, how come you’re using a shitty canteen cup instead of a spoon like the rest of us?’
‘Because I’m a sergeant-major,’ Schulze said majestically, dipping his cup into the mixture once again, ‘and you’re just a lowly sergeant. It’s as simple as that, Matz.’
Von Dodenburg, feeling the fiery Ami spirits now, laughed, as he listened to the two veterans’ banter. For a moment he was confident, but the time out of war was soon at an end.
‘What’s that racket?’ Matz asked suddenly.
Von Dodenburg dropped his spoon. A black speck was roaring in at them at tree-top level. ‘Get back to the tank!’
They dropped their canteen cups with a clatter. The black speck became a Mustang fighter-bomber barrelling in at 400 mph, its engine cowling painted like the snout of a shark. As they pelted for the Tiger, its engine howled, a monstrous black shadow preceding it across the desolate countryside. Violent purple lights crackled along the Ami plane’s wings.
‘Rockets!’ von Dodenburg yelled, down!’
As they flung themselves into the mud, crimson flame stabbed the sky. The rockets flew at them, trailing a tail of fiery sparks. Explosions mushroomed all around. As the Mustang flashed by above them, blackening out the sky momentarily, Schulze yelped out in agony.
‘My shitty left wing!’ he cursed. ‘The bastard got me!’
‘On your feet – quick,’ von Dodenburg cried. ‘No time for that now, Schulze.’
While the Mustang zoomed high into the leaden sky, preparing for another attack, they flung themselves into the battered Tiger.
‘Let’s go,’ van Dodenburg ordered breathlessly, as Schulze slumped behind the cannon, his broad face pale.
As Matz crashed home the gears and the big tank started to rattle towards the railways embankment close by, von Dodenburg swung the turret mg round to face the Mustang. Howling hideously, the Ami plane came hurrying in once more. They heard the crackle of cannon-fire. Twenty-millimetre slugs started cutting the air all around them, gouging up earth in angry bursts behind the Tiger.
Von Dodenburg pressed the trigger of the mg. Tracer streamed towards the Mustang with its great silver stars. He had missed. The next instant the plane soared over his head, almost knocking him from his perch with its howling slipstream, before racing straight upwards into the sky. Desperately he changed the cartridge belt, cursing madly because the mg barrel was already red-hot and burned his fingers. While he did so, his eyes swept the horizon looking for better cover. Then he spotted it – a small opening beneath the railway, perhaps constructed by the engineers of the Reichbahn to allow the farmers easy access to their fields beyond.
‘Matz,’ he cried above the howl of the plane, coming in for the attack once more, ‘head for that tunnel over there!’
‘Our arse will stick out!’
‘Damn you, Matz, do as you are told – I don’t care if your eggs stick out! That’s our only—’
The rest of his words were drowned by the Mustang’s eight cannon. They drenched the whole area in their burning light. The Tiger reeled as one hit a nearside boogie. For one frightening moment, von Dodenburg thought she would throw a track. But Professor Porche’s brainchild had been well constructed. The Tiger rumbled on towards the cover of the tunnel. And then the Ami pilot made a mistake. Confident of his kill, he broke right, instead of zooming upwards at 400 mph. To reduce speed even more, he lowered his undercarriage. Now, coming in round for the last attack, his speed was less than three hundred, and his fire-spewing exhaust was directly in von Dodenburg’s sights. The SS colonel did not waste the opportunity offered him.
He pressed the trigger. A vicious stream of tracer hit the Mustang. Pieces of metal started to fly from its fuselage. The tail disappeared. Desperately the pilot tried to control the crippled plane as thick white glycol started to stream from the engine. Von Dodenburg did not relax his pressure on the trigger. He had no sympathy for these impersonal Ami and Tommy killers, who had murdered with impunity these last few months. The tracer struck the plane over and over again, tearing great lumps off, as the frantic pilot tried to ride it to the ground in one piece.
One wing hit the side of the railway embankment, crumpling like a banana skin. The Mustang somersaulted. Its blue-painted belly struck the line in a cloud of dust. It bounced up twenty metres into the air. Crashing down the next instant, just as Matz reached the safety of the tunnel, it burst into flame, silhouetting the trapped pilot against the blaze, a panic-stricken figure clawing frantically at a canopy-cover which would not open. But von Dodenburg’s attention was already elsewhere. In his dying agony, the Ami had called for his running mates. Five black dots were silhouetted against the darkening sky, racing towards the burning Mustang, sensing blood, eager to finish off the tank trapped beneath the embankment for good.
‘Heaven, arse and twine!’ Schulze cursed weakly just before he passed out, hand clutched to the gory mess of his shoulder, ‘the bastards have really got us by the short and curlies now, sir …’
Notes
1. Before 1945, prostitutes had to be registered with the police and inspected regularly by police doctors; hence the yellow card.
2. SS nickname for the decorative lanyard worn by officer aides on the staff.
3. Anti-tank guns.
4. SS code for tanks.
5. Slang for a contraceptive.
6. Vengeance weapons, such as the V1 and V2 rockets.
7. Famous tank general.
8. German slang for homosexual.
FOUR
‘Gentlemen,’ the King said, raising his glass to the assembled American generals, ‘m-m-may I give you a t-t-toast?’
Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton and the rest, now flushed with good food and wine, raised their glasses dutifully. They knew that the British King had come to Belgium specifically to boost Monty’s1 morale after the failure of his Arnhem drop; but still this visit to Hodges’s First Army HQ was a nice gesture and as an ebullient Patton had commented a little earlier to Eisenhower, ‘Hell, Ike, the guy did give me another medal, didn’t he?’
‘I-I-I would like to wish you s-s-success over the J-J-Jerries in Aachen in the next forty-eight h-h-hours!’
‘I’ll second that, sir,’ Eisenhower said, his broad face split in a happy grin. He raised his glass.
The top brass followed suit, and settled down to an evening of military small talk, with the irrepressible Patton dominating the conversation, as usual, punctuating his stories with vicious stabs of his big cigar which he used as if it were a bayonet. ‘Why,’ he chuckled in his strangely high-pitched voice, speaking of the thievery of the Tunisian Arabs during the North African campaign, ‘I must have shot a dozen Arabs myself.’
King George VI looked impressed. ‘I say, is that s-s-so?’ he stuttered.
Eisenhower, a little flushed now from his bourbon and branch water, winked at Bradley, Patton’s superior, and asked: ‘How many did you say, Georgie?’
Patton pulled at his expensive cigar. Then his thin tough face relaxed in a mischievous grin. ‘Well, maybe it was only a half a dozen.’
‘How many?’ Eisenhower persisted. At the bottom of the table, running the length of the bare dining room in the commandeered Belgian chateau, the First Army Corps Commanders laughed at Patton’s discomforture. It was good to see old ‘Blood and Guts’, commander of the heartily disliked Third Army, taken down a peg or two.
The big general hunched his shoulders and laughed. Then he turned to the King, and said: ‘Well, at any rate, sir, I did boot two of them squarely in the -ah, ‘he caught himself just in time, ‘street at Gafsa!’
