Casca 4: Panzer Soldier (6 page)

Stopping a
kilometer outside Prokhorovka in an orchard, Langer was getting ready to send Gus in to get some paint so they could redo the camouflage and put on their battalion markings when Gus let out a yelp of joy. Walking in the open was one of the women's mortar crews.

Spotting the Tiger facing them, they froze and slowly put up their hands. The woman commanding the crew was all that Gus had dreamed of, massive tits that bulged the front of her drab uniform to the bursting point and legs like tree stumps sitting in high leather boots. Gus rushed her crying out, "
Ya Cheybya Loobloo Djavuschka
, I love you girls."

Sergeant Tina
Yurenova caught the look in his eyes and took off, tank or no tank. She ran into the orchard dodging between trees, Gus racing after her giving off cries of passion concerning her Alik (sexual organs). "Don't run from Uncle Gus, my little pigeon." He caught her tunic with one square- fingered hand and she turned and slugged him square in the face, crossing his eyes.

"She loves me," he cried and began tearing the clothes off her.

Langer and the others merely stared in amazement. Teacher started to stop him but Carl said to leave him alone. "When he's in heat he just might turn his attention to you. Besides, I'm not sure if she can't whip him in a fair fight."

Tina
Yurenova defended herself and her honor from the assault of this human tank. She kicked, clawed and fought, trying to knee him in the balls, but all to no avail, and soon all that was left on her were her boots. Gus was on her, the two floundering in the trees and grass, resembling two pink pigmy dinosaurs. They grappled, grunting and squealing, Tina Yurenova threatening to feed Gus his balls when Russia won the war. She kicked and cursed. The bushes shook until Langer thought the roots were going to be torn up. Suddenly the screams and curses stopped and gurgles of pleasure began to emerge. He caught a quick glimpse of fleshy white thighs over black boots, heels drumming the ground. A feminine giggle seemed out of place coming from the mouth of this woman. Her giggles were punctuated by roars of laughter from Gus as he demonstrated the merits of the German helmet. Soon both were completely involved, oblivious to anything else. Twice Gus tried to get up, only to be dragged back into the bushes. After what seemed to be hours, the two emerged stark naked, holding hands like teenagers, Yurenova's head on Gus's shoulder. Looking up she saw the rest of the crew watching her and ran back into the bushes to dress. She tossed Gus his uniform. While he was getting his trousers back on, Gus told Langer she promised to get him a job in a tractor factory in Ryazhsk where her brother was a foreman if he would desert. "Do you think I should?"

Teacher merely looked at him as if he were the personification of every base instinct known to mankind. "No," said Langer, "I don't think it's a love match that would endure. Now get your ass into town and find me some paint or I'll have your guts for suspenders." Gus looked back at his lady love. "Don't worry," Carl said. "We'll let them go. Now move it!"

Gus complied unwillingly and trotted off down the road. As the women disappeared from sight, Teacher asked, "What do you think they'll do to her for collaborating with the enemy?"

Langer chuckled. "They'll probably give her the Order of Lenin. I'm sure by now she's told the others she sacrificed her
honor to save them from the same horrible fate and that she only pretended to enjoy it for their sakes."

Teacher lit up his pipe, thought for a moment and then dismissed them from his mind with one statement. "You're probably right, but sometimes Gus worries me."

Three hours later, Gus was back, riding a motorcycle with a side car and inside enough paint to do three tanks.

"Where did you get the motorcycle?"
Then, imitating Heidemann's response, "Never mind, I don't want to know. Just leave it in the trees."

The rest of the day was spent turning their new Tiger I into a different tank, which was fortunate because shortly after they had finished and the paint barely dry, two SD
headhunters came by in a Kübelwagen asking if they had seen a Tiger with Totenkopf markings on it go by lately, being driven by a maniac who said he was with the 7th Panzer Division. Gus had an angelic expression on his face as he told them he had seen one earlier and pointed to a distant ridge to the north. The headhunters thanked him and wheeled their vehicle around, bounced off and headed in the direction indicated.

Langer stood confused for a moment and then turned to Teacher after checking his map. "Isn't that the ridge we bypassed yesterday where the Russian antitank guns were dug in?"

The sound of the Kübelwagen exploding answered the question for him. Gus just smiled and said, "Well, are we going to hang around here all day? Let's get on into town. It's about suppertime and I spotted a field kitchen while there that bears looking into." The smoke from the burning Volkswagen jeep sent up one lonely black tendril behind them as their new home clanked on the dirt road to join the rest of their unit.

In
Prokhorovka, Heidemann said nothing as they rumbled in. As far as he was concerned, they were still riding a Panther. In the next few days, the front collapsed as divisions were moved out of the line for transfer to Italy. Gus moaned at the thought of others going to Rome. He was going to miss the food and the women. He cursed fate for leaving him behind.

Every hour the Russian pressure became greater. The Germans fought a running battle as they withdrew, making Ivan pay for every step, but Ivan always seemed to have more men than they had bullets and by 15 July, they were in a defensive perimeter outside Kharkov. The city itself was burned out. Only a shell was left from the fighting that had taken place when the Germans captured it the last time.

Teacher fell in love with the Tiger's 88 mm gun. It fired a twenty-two-pound shell at 2,657 feet per second, heavy enough and fast enough to cut the turret of a T-34 like butter. It was slower, but the increased armor gave them a feeling of security. They were positioned near a battery of 88 mm flak guns which could serve dual purpose as antitank. Between them they had accounted for fourteen enemy tanks in the last three days without getting a scratch on their paint, but Ivan was keeping the pressure on them, bringing up an ever increasing amount of artillery and "Stalin organs" firing those horrendous barrages night and day.

General Voronezh massed two infantry armies, the 5th and 6th Guards, along with two tank armies packed into a front of no more than two miles, backed up with the support of 370 pieces of artillery per mile of front. The tanks had a depth of 100 to the mile. To the north,
Koniev was to attack Belgorod and then move southwards and hit Kharkov and also keep army detachment Kempf from being able to lend any support to the defenders.

The Germans were down to only 300,000 men in the pocket. The Soviets had them outmanned and out gunned and out tanked by at least three to one. Day after day, Langer's men faced wave after wave of Red soldiers throwing themselves into the fire of the German guns mindless of losses. They would come again and again and every day there were fewer familiar faces around them and no new ones to take their places. On 22 August, Field Marshal
Manstein ordered the city evacuated counter to Hitler's orders. Langer and his crew withdrew through burning buildings and exploding supply dumps. The city was to be destroyed and nothing would be left behind for the Russians to use. The sounds of the explosions rumbled all that day and night as the city died for the second time. Units leapfrogging each other kept the Russian bear at bay while they withdrew, destroying everything.

There was little left of the city of Kharkov except a
smoldering mass of rubble. The flames could be seen for fifty miles in any direction. Kharkov had been the third largest city in Russia. Behind them the retreating Germans did leave one thing – 133,000 men had been lost. Kharkov, the old-timers knew, was the beginning of the end.

Langer's Tiger moved with the rest of a long line of hundreds of
armored vehicles and trucks, passing horse-drawn wagons filled with supplies and the wounded. They moved back. Heidemann, his tank and the two others were all that remained. The strain was on every face, thin, drawn and exhausted. The weariness reached into the bones and men marched while asleep, stumbling caricatures of their former glory – ragged and tired they marched with the steps of men old before their time, trying to keep the blind fear of panic from their minds. They would stop at the Dnieper two hundred kilometers to the west. There they would stand and fight again on what was called the Wotan Line. Wotan, the ancient German god of war.

Langer slept in his seat. The others curled up where they could. The outside of the tank was covered with infantrymen and the survivors of a Luftwaffe antiaircraft crew that had been overrun. Everyone was heading west, a line of men and machines one hundred
kilometers long. The air force did its best to provide air cover and keep the Yaks, MIGs and Shtormoviks off them, but every day the burning hulks of tanks and trucks marked the way to the river. Several times they had to stop and fight a rear-guard action to keep Ivan from rolling them up. When at last they reached the crossing at Dniepropetrovsk and passed over the muddy waters, they collapsed and slept where they fell.

In the wake of the retreating German forces came the others, civilians, cattle, goats and herds of sheep and horses; everything that could move under its own power walked. The industrial machinery of the region was loaded onto trains and hauled back, everything from threshing machines to damaged tractors and tanks, anything that could be put into service of the Reich later, and at the same time deny the Bolsheviks the use of them.

As they withdrew, many divisions took Hitler's orders literally, "Scorched earth – leave nothing for the enemy!" The men evacuated were the technicians and those of gun-bearing age. For the Russians, that meant anyone from fourteen to sixty that could walk. Old men were especially useful in the first waves of assault for locating minefields...

Escorting this menagerie of animals and humanity were many of the
Freiwillegen
(volunteer) units, Turkomen from Asian Russia and mounted detachments of Cossack cavalry from the Caucasus. Ukrainian police along with the members of the Red Cross from Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia were mixed into the fleeing masses all looking to one thing, the river. There they would find safety from the pursuing Russian horses trying to cut them off.

First priority went to the hundred thousand wounded soldiers of the Reich. These were evacuated in the rail cars and trucks; none were left behind. After all, they would be needed later when they could fight again. The others would have to take their chances.

The command was given by the Ober Kommand Des Wehrmacht that everything in front of the river for a distance of twelve to twenty-five miles was to be destroyed down to the last house and barn. Forests were to be burned, and bridges blown, as the last of the retreating forces withdrew across them.

For the survival of those left behind, the German Force left one-fifth of the foodstuffs, though this did the civilians little good, as these stores were immediately confiscated for the use of the Red Army. Of the forty-three tanks of
Heidemann's company, only seven survived the maelstrom of Kursk and Kharkov, only forty-two men and junior officers answered the roll call. The rest were dead or on their way to slave labor camps beyond the Urals. Heidemann was the senior officer and his remnants were assigned as an ad hoc reserve force as they no longer existed as a regiment or even a company.

A smile broke through the dust caking
Heidemann's face and dimmed eyes when he saw the scarred face of Langer sticking up from the hatch of his Tiger I. They had lost contact since the evacuation of Kharkov, and personally he was glad to see the last of the burning refuse pile they had left behind. Three times now he had fought his way in and out of the city and had lost too many good men in the process. Perhaps this would be the last of it, Kharkov was a curse for armor. Tanks belonged where they could use their mobility to lunge deep behind the enemy rear and strike, like the horse cavalry of old, in daring penetrations that could spread panic all out of proportion to the actual threat. Just the thought of an enemy to your rear was terrifying. More than once a couple of lost German tanks had blundered unwittingly into a Russian headquarters area. The resulting confusion of the wildly firing tanks trying only to get out of there had been enough to start a frantic retreat, as whole divisions withdrew from the front lines in panic when they heard that their HQ was being attacked by Panzers.

Heidemann
tossed Langer a sack of army bread only four days old and two large cheeses that had seen better days. "Sorry, this is all there is. Supplies will take a while to straighten out. After all, they have to have the proper requisition forms, you know. Hunger is not reason enough for the machinery of the German army to grant one something to eat.”

Langer yelled something unintelligible down to Gus, who stuck his head up through the driver's hatch mumbling. He climbed out and then leaned back in grunting, his pants showing a large plaid patch on the ass. He hauled up a couple of sacks and tossed them down to the feet of
Heidemann. Jumping down to stand in front of him he clicked his heels, brought his arm up in the Hitler-style salute, bellowing at the top of his lungs. "Sir, Obergefreiter Gustav Beidemann begs to report that he has, using the initiative ordained in the book of Holy German Army regulations, section 23-2 sub paragraph 765-b, prevented certain items from falling into the hands of the godless subhuman Bolsheviks, which I present to Herr Hauptmann as regulations require for his disposal of, sir!" With a moué of distaste, Heidemann returned the salute in the army manner and kicked the sacks.

"You know Gus," Carl said. "When Kharkov was burning we came across a supply truck loaded with all the necessities of life for the general officers' mess. It had a busted axle so Gus shoved it out of the way with the Tiger, and in exchange for giving the driver a ride out of the town, we loaded up with enough general type food and booze to last for a couple of weeks."

Heidemann gave Gus a dirty look. "What happened to the truck? You know the penalty that will come down when the brass finds their chow is gone!"

Gus smirked. "No problem, Herr Hauptmann. Teacher put a round from the eighty-eight into the truck and it became just one more casualty of the greater war against Bolshevism."

In spite of himself, Captain Heidemann couldn't repress a grin. "All right, Langer, you take your animals and get to a place you can cover the bridge from." Picking up the sacks he looked at Gus still standing at rigid attention. "Beidemann, you are without a doubt the most obnoxious, ill-disciplined and insubordinate bastard I have ever met in my life." His bags clanked as he slung them over his shoulder.

"Thanks."

Before September ended the crossings at Cherkassy, Kremenchug, Dnepropetrovsk and Kanev had been in use day and night. Manstein's forces poured through these fragile channels and deployed to right and left, taking up positions on what was now to be called "The Eastern Rampart."

The Russians ignored German propaganda claims that they would be destroyed at the banks of the Dnieper and continued to overrun German rear-guard units at will until the twenty-first advance, elements of
Vatutin's 3rd Guards Army reached the banks of the river and, three days later had already established several small bridgeheads on the opposite banks where the German forces were spread too thin to effectively oppose them. During this phase the Germans had only one minor success. Vatutin ordered the 1st, 3rd and 5th Guards Parachute Brigades to be dropped on the German side of the Dnieper to reinforce the Soviet bridgeheads and to also block the advances of any German reinforcements. Their timing was a little off. The 1st and 3rd missed their DZ and the 10th Panzer Grenadier Division having moved in the night before was directly under them when the 5th Guards made their jump. The 5th Guards were promptly torn to pieces by the Grenadiers, many of them while still hanging in the sky from their parachutes. Less than two thousand of the nearly eight thousand men dropped survived the next few days to join up with partisan forces in the area. The rest were hunted down and killed or captured.

Langer returned from
Heidemann's HQ with the word they were to load up and move out. They were to head north a few kilometers and lend support to a battalion of Jagers that faced a section of the river where it narrowed.

"All right, Teacher, get the others together and take this thing," referring to the Tiger, "over to the depot and load up with everything you can get your hands on. If there's any problem, let Gus do the negotiating. I'll meet you there a little later. I've got to figure out our route on this.” He took a Russian road map out of his jacket. “I don't know how the Russians ever find us if they're using their own charts."