by Tom Zola
“Where’s that coming from?” the lieutenant asked. “Theo, move the turret to the left!”
The loader turned the turret. The shells from the Russian assault guns kept coming. The beasts fired three to four times per minute, pronging many square feet of land with every shot. But now the T-34’s also threw themselves into the fray. They pushed forward out of the gaps between the gargantuan self-propelled cannons and raced towards Elfriede, eager to make it into combat distance. Sparks peppered Elfriede’s armor as well as Meinert’s immobile tank. AP rounds scorched the armor.
“Infantry with anti-tank gun from the left of the woods,” Nitz, who had just received the information from Meinert’s radio operator, reported, gasping for breath. Streams of sweat ran down the staff sergeant’s face; the rest of the crew was sweating just as badly.
No breeze moved the heat inside the tank, and it smelled of stress, gasoline, and fire. The air was filled with soot that settled on the oily faces and in the lungs of the men, making them burn and itch. But in the presence of the enemy, these were minor matters.
“From the left?” Engelmann repeated incredulously. “But that’s where ours were supposed to be!”
Before he could give another order, Meinert’s tank burst into flames. A hit! Who knew where it came from! Then an enormous blast went through Elfriede, making her steel glow with heat. At the very next moment, Born’s shrill scream echoed through the interior, drowning out the din of battle. Engelmann looked down from his seat and saw that Born’s arms and torso were soaked in blood while the young man was screaming his head off. Born fell sideways and suddenly lay twitching across Nitz. The radio operator could barely reach his instruments any more. Elfriede stopped while more anti-tank rounds tried in vain to penetrate the armor of the Panzer IV. Again sparks rained on Elfriede’s armor.
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Engelmann, Münster, Nitz and Ludwig held their breath while Born bubbled blood and foam. The lieutenant froze at the sight of his loader. He had never seen a hit like this one. The sight shook him to the core. For a split second the situation paralyzed him, and the sickly-sweet smell of burned flesh filled his nostrils. He almost threw up.
“Ebbe,” Engelmann whispered as if there was the risk of being overheard by the enemy, “tell the old man that we won’t make it. They must come ASAP. After that no more radio communication! As for the rest: Put on your gas masks! We’ll try our old trick.”
They all knew the drill and put on the gas masks they had stored near their seats. Then Münster and Ludwig pushed the twitching Born back onto his seat and put his mask over his face as well.
Engelmann grabbed the first of four smoke grenades he had been carrying with him in his tank since the beginning of 1941; they looked almost like common stick grenades. He pulled the fuse and dropped it. It fell on the floor of the tank with a metallic clink.
Carefully and very slowly Nitz opened his hatch. Then they waited while the grenade hissed and suddenly started to spit dense white smoke. Though it immediately billowed outside through the open covers, the inside of Elfriede was completely filled with the dense fumes.
They waited. They didn’t move and hardly dared to breathe. All they could do was hope that this would fool the enemy even though the artificial smoke was white, not black. But the trick had worked before, close to Kiev. They kept waiting. Engelmann stared at the ceiling of the tank without blinking, and made a fist. The enemy fire had actually subsided. Then the radio crackled. Carefully – oh so carefully – Nitz bent down to the receiver unit and pressed it to his ear. Finally he looked up, directly at the lieutenant.
“The regiment’s coming,” he said.
*
“Goddammit, boy, if you don’t start shooting soon, I’ll beat you to a pulp!” Pappendorf blared and pulled Berning up to his feet. Bullets flew through the windows and the hole in the wall, hitting the far side of the room. Hege continued to shoot like a madman, but he had run through the ammo fast, and his gun jammed now that all three change barrels were glowing red from too much use.
Pappendorf pulled Berning to a window and forced him to take his place right next to Hege.
“SHOOT, WILL YA?” he yelled at the top of his lungs; the loudness of his voice even topped the noise of the MG.
Berning stared out the window at the chaos outside; his eyes became wider with every heartbeat. The red flood had poured over the whole sector. Russian and German soldiers ran around on the ground and fought bloody close combat. Here, a private rammed his dagger into a Russian’s loins; there, several Red Army soldiers kicked a German lying on the ground until he stopped moving. The adversaries fired at each other at close range, and when the cartridge chambers were empty, they used their firearms as clubs. They grabbed at anything that could kill. They bashed each other’s heads in with pitchforks, helmets, shovels and crowbars. Screaming men rolled across the ground that was already littered with corpses. Dead men in brown and field-gray uniforms covered the battlefield. And right in the middle of this chaos were the Russian tanks. They were everywhere, and their tracks smashed the ground and the grass, buildings and bodies alike.
Berning quivered. His whole body trembled like during an earthquake. His hands gripped his rifle and soaked it in sweat. Obviously the Russians were slowly gaining the upper hand down there.
Now Pappendorf himself fired two short salvos with his submachine gun and killed a Russian. Then he grabbed Berning by the neck of his uniform, pulled him so close that their helmets collided and yelled in his face, “DAMMIT, START SHOOTING!” He grabbed Berning’s weapon and pulled on it until Berning was roughly in a shooting position.
The sergeant looked over the iron sights of his gun at the mass of Red Army soldiers down on the ground. His index finger rested on the trigger. Straight in front of him, a hundred and sixty yards away, a throng of Russians moved across the open space. Berning focused on one of the enemy soldiers. He could see a man with a strained expression on his face. He might have been a farmer or a bank teller who wanted to get away from this war as much as Berning did. Maybe he had a wife and kids, and if he didn’t, then at least he had a mother and a father. Berning’s finger shuddered. He couldn’t muster the strength to pull the trigger.
Pappendorf stood directly next to him and screeched into his ear, his face distorted with rage and looking as if it might explode at any moment, while Hege reported that he was down to the reserve rounds, which meant that he only had five hundred cartridges left.
“If you don’t shoot now, Sergeant,” Pappendorf sputtered with rage, “if you don’t stop them right here, then these barbarians will step on German soil next year! Is that what you want? They’ll come; they’ll march into your hometown, too! They’ll make your father their slave! They’ll make your mother and your sisters their whores if you don’t stop them right HERE! Is THAT what you want? Is that what you want, you MISERABLE BASTARD, you?”
Berning’s ears rang while the words echoed in his head. He looked down at the battlefield. This one Russian out of that crowd of enemies was still in his sights. He didn’t really look dangerous, and he didn’t look like a rapist, either. In fact, he looked pretty much like a German. Berning’s finger trembled over the trigger.
“DAMMIT, I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOU. SHOOT ALREADY!” Pappendorf’s fist hit Berning on his Stahlhelm. The blow made Berning’s head pulsate while his finger pulled the trigger, and the primer at the rear edge of the cartridge ignited with a loud bang. The projectile of the 7.92-millimeter round left the barrel of the gun and made its way down into the combat zone. It zoomed over the heads of Germans and Russians fighting for their lives. It hissed over a soldier who was sitting on another soldier, smashing his face to a bloody pulp with his helmet. It zoomed over an anti-tank fire team that eliminated the crew of a panzer with firebombs and sticky charges. Then the projectile hit the soldier Berning had made his target. It hit him in his abdomen, shredding his uniform, scorching his flesh, tearing his liver apart, and made the tissue behind
it burst so that the blood flooded the surrounding organs. The man’s face contorted. He started to run but then he stumbled, crashing on the ground face down. Screaming and twisting like an earthworm, he suffered through his death throes while life bled out of the wound in his belly.
Time seemed to have stopped. Berning’s heart started to pound and pushed up against his throat. He had clearly seen the Russian down there fall over and lie there, twisting and turning in pain. But the sergeant’s fingers didn’t stop.
His left hand held the rifle tightly, and his right hand grabbed the bent-bolt handle, pressed it up and pulled it. This way it pulled the firing pin and spring back, and the cartridge case was ejected from the weapon. Berning pushed the bent-bolt handle back into its anterior position. Thus the spring pressed the next cartridge up where it was grasped by the firing pin and fed into the bolt lugs of the cartridge chamber. Automatically, just as he had been trained, just as he had been drilled to do without any emotion or pity, he went through the motions. Berning’s Karabiner 98k was ready to fire. Before the sergeant had comprehended it, before he could comprehend anything since his mind was still occupied with the Russian he had shot, his weapon seemed to raise itself again.
His eyes found the next target through the iron sights, his finger pulled the trigger, and another Russian fell over down there and stayed on the ground forever. This procedure was repeated three more times without Berning really being in control of his body.
Five shots, five hits. After the last cartridge case had been ejected from his weapon, the sergeant squatted near the window and loaded the next five rounds. Pappendorf nodded, satisfied, and turned back to the enemy forces. He emptied his submachine gun into the crowd. Hege cursed and groaned because his gun was malfunctioning at every second burst of fire by now. Still, the ammunition was used up more quickly than was good in this situation.
“Two hundred fifty left,” he yelled and kept firing. All of a sudden something hissed through the window, tore up the wooden frame and made Hege scream. The private first class fell on his side and held his bleeding hand, but he immediately struggled to get up again.
“It’s nothing!” he grunted, grabbed his MG and started to shoot again.
Berning squatted in his cover, breathing through his mouth. He narrowed his eyes to slits; then he jumped up and fired the next five rounds into the crowd. He could see that in the south, where earlier four smoking German tanks had littered the plain, now dozens of gray panzers with Balkenkreuzes rolled into battle - but half of them were already burning, while the oversized Russian assault guns still fired, underwhelmed by everything the Germans threw at them.
*
The hope that the regiment would bring salvation dissipated as quickly as these huge assault guns could shoot. Almost half the German panzers were burning or already torn apart, while wounded crew members abandoned their tanks and perished in the fire of the Russian infantry.
Holding the last smoke grenade in his hand, Engelmann looked at his three remaining crew members – Born had stopped breathing three minutes ago.
“We have to get out of here,” the lieutenant whispered.
Nitz pulled out his pistol. “My suggestion, Sepp: I’ll be the first one to leave and sprint over to Meinert’s tank. I’ll draw the fire on me while you guys run for our tanks.”
“No way. We run together, it’s all or none of us.”
Nitz nodded with a serious expression on his face.
“Then let’s go,” the lieutenant began to order. “I’ll go first, then Theo, Hans, Ebbe. Stay close behind me. We’ll try to reach the nearest panzer at six o’clock and hitch a hike.”
“Roger,” Münster whispered.
Regimental commander Sieckenius had just announced the troops’ withdrawal over the radio.
“It’s high time! Let’s go!” Engelmann pulled the fuse of the last grenade and let it drop in Elfriede’s belly. The German tankers quickly opened all hatches. The fog of the last smoke grenade still enclosed the panzer, and now fresh smoke was added. Engelmann climbed out of his cupola, jumped on the hull and then down on the grass. He was surrounded by dense fog; a moment later the silhouettes of three figures came through the white wall and stumbled towards him. Well then, off we go!
The lieutenant started to run, and his men immediately followed him. They pushed through the wall of white smoke into the open field. Burning tank wrecks were everywhere, while the remaining panzers of the regiment went into reverse and began to withdraw. Russian armor-piercing shells landed on the grass and tore craters into the ground. Chunks of dirt and rocks flew around. The sound of Russian voices and the fire of hand weapons emerged from the forest. But Engelmann and his crew just kept on running. They ran farther and farther. Engelmann discovered his company commander’s tank, which was hit at that same moment and exploded. Within the blink of an eye, a Panzer III that was right next to it was blown into the air.
The regiment had shrunk to about sixty vehicles, but suddenly things started to happen. In the midst of heavy enemy fire, the German panzers halted, started up again, and accelerated. Gunfire threw tiny spurts of dirt at Engelmann’s feet up into the air. The officer headed for a wrecked tank and threw himself behind it, using it as cover from the fire that came out of the woods. His crew followed his example.
“We have to keep going,” Nitz urged him.
“No,” the lieutenant replied, pointing at the remaining forces of the regiment driving towards them, advancing again at the cost of even more casualties. Then he turned his head and glanced in the direction of the collective farm where the large assault guns suddenly started to turn around.
*
Berning had already fired one third of his ammunition when he heard a loud bang and one of the enormous Russian assault guns burst apart.
“What on Earth was that?“ the sergeant gasped and loaded the next strip into his gun.
Pappendorf took cover under the window and proclaimed, “Now, Kameraden, the Slavs are in for a big surprise!”
Unexpected by friend and foe equally, a massive formation broke out of the sparse woods to the east. Dozens of main battle tanks, Panzer IV’s mostly, rolled onto the battlefield, but the leading edge of the formation was formed by a group of new Panthers around four tank destroyers that in size nearly matched the Russians’ gargantuan assault guns. Admittedly, neither the Panthers nor the Ferdinands, as these German tank destroyers were called, had overcome their teething problems yet. They had a certain propensity for engine fires when the motors were started - but if they could get running without going up in flames, they were a match for even the Russian assault guns; and those rolling now on the bloody grounds had already survived Operation Citadel ’til this day. The Panthers, which were obviously based on the T-34 model, and the sixty-five-ton Ferdinands, destroyed half the Russian assault guns before they could even turn. In between, the German tanks ate up medium-sized Russian tanks and spat them out in the form of blazing clumps of metal.
Immediately the Russians started to panic as their tanks dropped like flies. Part of the infantry started to withdraw while several other groups doggedly defended the few yards of farmland they had gained during combat. German Panzergrenadiers charged ahead under cover of their half-tracks and started to target positions in the woods.
One Ferdinand suddenly broke out of formation and drove straight between the farm buildings – a serious mistake. Russian soldiers immediately crept towards it. The crew of the Ferdinand realized too late that they were trapped. The massive tank destroyer did not come with a machine gun on board, although many crews carried one inside it so they could fire it through the main barrel in an emergency situation. But since it could be moved only slightly, the steel colossus was just what the Russian infantry was waiting for. Soviet soldiers destroyed the tracks of the Ferdinand by aiming hand grenades at it. Then they climbed onto the steel monster.
But that didn’t change the overall situation. The strong tank formation from the east, and Panze
r Regiment 2 from the south, mercilessly shot the Russian tanks to pieces.
“Berning, come with me! We’ll drive the Slavs back!” Pappendorf ordered, and Berning followed him down the stairs. The remains of the platoon and the squadron lay there – many wounded, some dead. The floor was flooded with spent cartridges, and on the window sill hand grenades were lined up, ready to be used. Some of them were already tied together into the bigger explosive packages the German soldiers called geballte Ladung, a pack able to damage a tank but equally prone to blow its user up. Pappendorf grabbed the four remaining soldiers of his platoon who were still able to fight, and stormed outside.
“Take the hand grenades with you!” he barked before he left.
Ahead of them, the Ferdinand was in flames. Whole groups of Russian soldiers were climbing all over it. Pappendorf and his men opened fire. The enemy soldiers scattered in all directions; some of them were hit and fell off the tank destroyer.
“Sergeant, take it from the right! I’ll take two Landsers and come from the left side!” Pappendorf illustrated his orders by giving hand signals. Berning confirmed and charged ahead, two privates behind him. He ran around the tank from the right side and saw the Russians run away. He shot two of them and took cover. His privates, who were still behind him, as well as Pappendorf’s assault detachment on the other side of the tank, took care of the rest.
Everywhere, Russian soldiers ran away while the last tank forces of the Red Army started to drive around aimlessly, more and more getting picked off by the merciless crossfire.
“You two – take up position in front of the Ferdinand!” Berning ordered the two privates, who immediately ran to the front and dropped on the ground beside the tank destroyer. Berning turned around, hoping to find a position at the building wall behind him where a narrow alley between two buildings opened up so he could roughly cover the southeast direction. The tank battle still raged while the soldiers of the Red Army fled. Berning entered the alley when suddenly a door was pushed open and a Russian soldier stumbled out. The sergeant froze; their eyes met. The Russian raised his gun but Berning was faster. He shot the Russian, hurried on without even losing a step, and found himself a suitable position.
