Claws of Steel

by Leo Kessler

  Von Dodenburg signalled again. Bent and at the double, they advanced on the stark outline of M-13 rocket-launchers, which guarded the rear of the Popov positions. A sentry staggered half asleep from between two huge piles of 30 mm rockets. Schulze hit him with the Reeperbahn equalizer. He went down as if he had been pole-axed, the bloody ruin of his mouth full of broken teeth.

  ‘Grenades,’ von Dodenburg whispered urgently as they crouched next to the unconscious sentry.

  A bareheaded giant with two huge sacks of grenades, in addition to the three belts of Spandau ammo slung over his enormous chest, dropped into the mud beside him.

  ‘The cannon,’ said von Dodenburg. ‘Time fuse for –’ he checked the luminous dial of his issue watch ‘– exactly five minutes from now.’

  The gigantic grenadier disappeared into the rain. Von Dodenburg put his hand on the centre of his helmet, the signal for ‘to me.’

  The twenty or so survivors of the 1st Company crowded around him, the raindrops dripping off the rims of their helmets.

  ‘Break up into twos. Check that you’ve all got grenades. Post yourselves outside the bunkers.’ He indicated the squat outlines of the dug-in Russian positions below the mortar battery. ‘As soon as the white flares start coming up from the south-east, you know that the balloon’s going up. Then in, double quick and sort the Popovs out. No messing. Grenade through the opening and straight on inside.’

  ‘Prisoners?’ somebody asked softly.

  ‘Nix! We’ve got no time for them. Besides we haven’t enough men spare to guard them. No, clean the Popovs out and then get yourselves ready for their counter-attack. The whole idea is to hold this position until Lieutenant Schwarz’s 2nd Company can reach us. Any questions now?’ He stared round their pale blobs of faces under the dripping helmets. ‘All right, Schulze, you come with me. The rest of you – happy landings!’

  ‘Happy landings, sir,’ they answered dutifully.

  Swiftly they stole away and posted themselves at the entrances of the Russian bunkers, fingers tensed on their weapons. There was no sound save the snoring of their unsuspecting victims inside and the rat-tat of some ancient Russian machine gun a long way off, chopping away like some dogged woodpecker. Von Dodenburg looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Still two minutes to go. Time seemed to have stopped. He felt the sweat begin to start up all over his body. He freed one hand and then the other from his machine pistol and wiped them dry on his trousers. It was tension that was making him sweat, he knew that. It was always the same at moments like this. He gripped his Schmeisser again and within seconds his hands were slimy with perspiration again. He cursed softly to himself and released his right hand. Suddenly there was a hush. He turned, startled. A flare had sailed into the air, and another. Schulze’s big face suddenly shone an unnatural white. For a moment the young officer did not move. He couldn’t. He seemed rooted to the spot. Another flare hissed into the dripping sky. The Popov machine gunner quickened his fire. Below them in the bunker, the others began to stir uneasily.

  ‘Now!’ he roared suddenly.

  Schulze shot forward. With his big boot, he kicked open the door of the bunker. In the same instant, he flung in the stick grenade and slammed the door shut again.

  There was a thick muffled crump. A scream rang out. Schulze kicked open the door again and jumped back. Standing splay-legged in the opening, machine pistol tucked into his hip, von Dodenburg poured in a vicious hail of fire. He couldn’t miss. The screaming half-dressed Popovs were packed in the entrance, clawing each other frantically in their efforts to get out. A couple of them, bleeding from multiple wounds, their faces blackened from the grenade explosion, staggered out, crying the only German word they knew, ‘Comrade … comrade!’

  Schulze did not hesitate. He kicked the two of them into the mud and stabbed them to death there in the crimson slush. Von Dodenburg rushed inside, his machine pistol held at the ready. The place stank of unwashed bodies and black tobacco which even the acrid smell of the explosive could not hide. He sprang over shattered bodies, illuminated by the hissing petroleum lamp still functioning on the little wooden table in the centre of the bunker. Suddenly he heard a faint whimpering. He spun round, his nerves going like trip hammers. To his right there was a dark passage leading off the main bunker. Pulling out his last remaining grenade, he ripped out the pin and lobbed it down the dark passage. Quickly he flung himself against the protection of the earth wall. At his feet a Popov groaned and tried to raise himself. As the grenade exploded he kicked the Russian viciously in the face. His head clicked back like that of a wooden puppet, his neck broken neatly.

  Von Dodenburg sprang forward, spraying the passage with lead as he ran up it. But it was a waste of precious metal. The only occupants of the big inner chamber, which was obviously a command post, were already dead or dying. One sole Popov, whose stiff board epaulettes bore the golden insignia of a senior colonel, tried to raise himself, a red jet pumping from a severed artery in his throat. Von Dodenburg didn’t give him a chance. The Russian fell back, his upper body shattered. Then there was no sound, save for an echoing silence and the soft dribble of the dying Colonel’s blood into the dry dust.

  Von Dodenburg staggered back against the wall and leaned there, his chest heaving frantically. They’d pulled it off; they’d done it! He felt all energy drain out of him, as if someone had just opened a secret tap. It seemed, as if he would never be able to move again. But a moment later, Schulze came running up the passage, crying out his name in alarm and in the far distance the German heavies opened up to support Wotan’s attack. He pulled himself together.

  ‘Here, Schulze,’ he cried. ‘I’m here.’ Just as Schulze burst into the command post, the first Popov counter-fire hissed viciously over their heads, shaking the whole bunker and von Dodenburg knew the fun and games had started.

  The whole line trembled like a dying animal. Time and time the rockets crashed down on it, their angry red tails streaking after them, as the Russians tried to knock out what was left of von Dodenburg’s company. But the Popovs who had built the positions had done a fine job, as they always did, and although the bunkers rocked alarmingly, nothing but a direct hit could put them out of action. As Schulze roared between salvoes:

  ‘I think I’ll stay here for the duration, sir. It’s safer!’

  Von Dodenburg cupped his hands round his mouth, his teeth gleaming against his blackened face, and yelled back. ‘Rather you than me, Schulze! It’s like being in a force twelve gale – my stomach’s heaving as if I’m on the high seas!’

  But just after Schwarz’s first attempt to break through to them failed, the artillery fire slackened and the infantry came in: masses of small men in earth-coloured blouses running forward in packed ranks, crying their usual hurrah. They mowed them down by the hundred, each two-man team working independently, confident of their superiority to these sub-human creatures who sacrificed their precious lives so frivolously. The Popov bodies piled up five deep only twenty metres from their positions, but they stopped them all right; and soon the survivors were streaming back the way they had come, leaving the battlefield to the artillery once more.

  Soon the command bunker began to rock once more to the explosion of the rockets and what von Dodenburg took to be 105 mm guns. But now he had recovered his nerve. Peering through the loop-hole at the body-littered battlefield, he yelled:

  ‘Schulze, I’ll stand watch, while you go and see if you can rustle up anything to eat. The cabbage steam is beginning to rise within me.’

  ‘Sir,’ Schulze said, slinging the two Russian sub-machine guns he was using now that he had run out of ammunition for his own Schmeisser. ‘But I can’t promise you much except that boiled mongrel sausage the Ivans eat.’

  ‘It sounds like the best Kempinski could provide,’ von Dodenburg yelled, as Schulze, the born looter, began to rummage among the debris of the command bunker. But the big Hamburger returned with something else beside two hunks of coarse Popov black bread and w
edges of bright red sausage balanced on them to be washed down with a fiery mixture of rain water and vodka.

  He swallowed a piece of the garlic sausage and casually rolled a coin across the floor to where von Dodenburg squatted with his back against the trembling earth wall. Curiously the officer, his mouth full of bread and vodka mixture, picked it up and examined it.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked after a while. Schulze’s reply was drowned by a fresh salvo of rockets. Impatiently he waited till they were finished, while von Dodenburg stared at the dull yellow coin with the Imperial Eagle of Old Russia stamped on one side and the head of an unidentifiable Czar on the other.

  ‘Twenty rouble piece,’ Schulze yelled finally.

  ‘Oh,’ the officer answered without too much interest, and was about to roll it across the floor back to Schulze when the Hamburger added:

  ‘In gold – almost pure gold.’

  Von Dodenburg whistled through his teeth, while Schulze observed his expression, a curious look in his usually frank eyes. ‘Gold, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s enough there to pay the great whore of Buxtehude for a whole week of nooky.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Hm, hm.’ Schulze took another slug of vodka mixture and wiped the back of his sleeve across his mouth, but he did not take his eyes off von Dodenburg’s face.

  ‘All right, Schulze,’ von Dodenburg bellowed as the Stalin organs started up again, ‘Pee or get off the pot. You’ve got to tell something – good, tell me it.’

  ‘Back in that other room, we must have killed a real old Russki big shot with that grenade. There wasn’t much left of his upper body, but he had enough tin on his chest to make even our beloved CO envious as far as I could make out, his badges of rank made him out to be a major-general.’

  ‘Any documents, maps and the like?’ von Dodenburg roared.

  ‘I didn’t look, Captain. I found this – and that was enough for Mrs Schulze’s little boy.’ He reached inside his tattered, mud-stained tunic and brought out what looked like an old-fashioned money belt. He tossed it towards the officer and it fell heavily into the dust before him. ‘If you want to count it,’ he said. ‘And I did – you’ll find there are close on three hundred of them in there.’

  ‘Well, you could have a lot of Buxtehude whores, for that, Schulze.’

  ‘I could, sir, but I don’t want the whores. I’ve still got my good looks and my charm, sir after all. I don’t need to buy my tail yet.’

  ‘What do you want then?’ von Dodenburg tensed as a 105 mm shell landed close behind the bunker, showering earth and pebbles on their helmets. ‘Well, go on – what do you want, man?’

  ‘Out,’ Schulze snapped laconically, his voice full of determination.

  ‘Out of what.’

  ‘Out of this shit, out of the Wotan, out of the SS, out of Germany!’

  Von Dodenburg looked at him, his mouth open. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me, Herr von Dodenburg! But don’t get me wrong. If some sodding Popov knocked me off tomorrow with a nice clean bullet, I wouldn’t exactly welcome the event, but I’m not scared of it. What I’m scared shitless about is what is to come. I couldn’t stand a Popov camp or any other POW cage. No booze, no dames – no, that’s not for me.’ He shook his head firmly. ‘And that Marie there in the belt is our way out.’

  ‘Our?’ von Dodenburg echoed the word stupidly.

  ‘Yeah, I want you to come along with me.’ Eagerly Schulze explained his plan. How a couple of the coins would buy them a fake evacuation ticket on one of the hospital trains bound for the Reich. There he knew a man down at the docks – ‘the little bastard’s been inside the nick a couple of times and he likes his sauce, but he’s the best forger in St Pauli’ – who would fake them a couple of civilian ID cards. With these they would make their way into Occupied France and make contact with the Catalan professional smugglers who regularly took refugees across the frontier into Spain.

  ‘From there, well,’ Schulze shrugged expansively while von Dodenburg stared at him in open-mouthed disbelief, ‘the world’s ours – the Argentine, Brazil, Chile – who cares. As long as there’s no war and no SS there.’ He broke off suddenly. ‘Well, what do you think, Herr von Dodenburg? It’s the only damn way to save our hides before it’s too late!’

  Von Dodenburg opened and closed his mouth rapidly like a stranded fish gasping for air. ‘You, you,’ he stuttered, unable to find the words to express his outrage. ‘You can’t expect me to—’

  But he never completed the sentence. The roar of the Stalin organs stopped abruptly to be replaced by the rusty rattle of Tiger tracks. Outside a well-remembered Prussian voice rasped:

  ‘Wotan to me – SS Assault Battalion Wotan rally on me!’ The Battalion had finally broken through.

  FIVE

  The bloody advance to Kursk went on under the merciless white-hot Russian sun. One day after they had broken through the second line of defence, a fleet of old three-engined ‘Auntie Jus’1 flew over their positions. Sedately and in perfect formation, despite the Russian flak, they released the great Do 230 gliders they had been towing. Moments later the gliders’ monstrous black shadows zoomed in low over the baked steppe to make perfect landings. Before the Russian artillery ranged in on them, the glider pilots evacuated the wood and fabric planes, lying on the ground now like helpless birds.

  Men and material poured from them. For the most part they were teenagers straight from the training schools, some of them with only six weeks’ basic training behind them. Many of them, too, spoke German with outlandish accents – ethnic Germans from all over occupied Europe, recruited by Reichsführer Himmler’s ‘body-snatchers’ by force or false promises. The material wasn’t much better either: patched-up Mark IVs from previous campaigns, armed with outdated short 75 mms, which hadn’t been even properly fired in.

  But in spite of Sergeant Metzger’s disgruntled report to his CO that ‘two hundred booty Germans and eight toy tanks’ were ‘present and correct’, the Vulture was glad to have them. In the last four days the Battalion had lost nearly 50 per cent of its effectives and the new blood was urgently needed.

  Twelve hours later, the Third Company, where most of the reinforcements went, was probing the Popov’s third line of defence when it swung into a carefully staged Russian trap. Tempted into attacking what looked like a wandering Cossack cavalry battalion, the Third was flanked by a whole brigade of Soviet assault guns, cunningly dug-in hull-down on the high ground to their right. The Popov SU-76s were armed with the inferor 76 mm gun. Under different circumstances the 3rd Company’s 88 mm would have made short work of them. But the SU-76s were so well dug in that they could blast one Tiger after another without a single casualty to themselves. Within thirty minutes the 3rd had ceased to exist. Only two German tanks escaped, one of them commanded by the 3rd’s 20-year-old Commanding Officer.

  He reported the loss of his company to the Vulture in the prescribed military way, then he excused himself for a moment and walked across to the nearest shattered tree, as if he were going to urinate. Instead he pulled out his duty pistol, placed it against his temple and squeezed the trigger. The bullet shattered his skull, the blood splattering the Vulture’s over large riding boots. Calmly the Vulture took out his handkerchief and flicked the blood off while an ashen-faced Metzger stared at him aghast.

  ‘Bury the bloody fool, Metzger,’ the Vulture rasped, no trace of emotion in his thin Prussian voice, ‘and see that I sign the recommendation for a bit of tin for him – say, the Iron Cross, second class!’ He sniffed and peered through his monocle to check if his boots were clean. ‘That’s about all he deserves for losing useless company like that. If this had been 1940 I would have court-martialled him. All right, Metzger, get the lead out of your arse! Move it!’

  That same night a long line of trucks from the 8th Panzer Division which was in reserve rolled into their laager. A bewildered company of tankers in their black uniforms dropped into the dust and lined up
in front of Geier and his officers. Hurriedly a heavy-set tank captain clicked to attention in front of the Vulture and made his report.

  ‘Captain Stuke, 1st Company, Seventh Battalion and two hundred men, sir!’

  The Vulture eyed him with a mirthless smile. Von Dodenburg knew what he was thinking – the Panzer Captain was a typical base stallion, his sole decoration the sport medal in bronze. Finally the Vulture returned the Captain’s salute.

  ‘Welcome to SS Assault Battalion Wotan, Stuke,’ he said.

  ‘SS Assault Battalion Wotan!’ the other officer echoed his words stupidly. ‘But Major, no one told us at HQ that we were to join the Armed SS.’

  ‘Well, this must be a pleasant surprise for you, eh! It isn’t every day that one gets the opportunity to join an elite formation like the Wotan, is it?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand that, Major,’ Stuke said, his face growing red. ‘But one needs time to make a decision like that. You’ll forgive me, Major, but I can’t simply join the Armed SS—’

  ‘Do you or don’t you?’ the Vulture cut in icily, the smile gone, his pale blue eyes gleaming dangerously. At his side von Dodenburg felt sorry for the blustering tank captain.

  ‘No,’ the other officer said lamely.

  ‘Thank you, soldier,’ the Vulture snapped and in the same instant he reached out and ripped off first one and then the other of the tanker’s epaulettes. ‘SS Soldier Stuke you may join the ranks.’

  ‘But, this … this is an outrage,’ the other man spluttered.

  The Vulture ignored him completely. He turned to Officer Cadet Barsch, a one-armed veteran of the old Wotan, who had volunteered again for the Armed SS after being invalided out after losing his arm in 1941. Barsch’s chest glittered with decorations for bravery. ‘Barsch, will you be so kind as to take over the 3rd Company. Ensure that every man has the Wotan arm-band sewn on before dawn.’