Casca 4: Panzer Soldier (7 page)

Teacher watched the broad back of his tank commander as he heaved one 88 mm shell after another up to Gus. Gus handed them to Yuri, who stuck them into the holding racks. Langer was as strong as anyone he had ever seen for his size. He never seemed to suffer from the almost chronic conditions of diarrhea which hounded most armies in the field. Bad water, bad food, bad schnapps, nothing seemed to upset him for long. What was there about him that picked at the edges of his mind? Why did Langer live when others died? There was the time when they had been overrun by Siberians and Carl had been hit in the gut. Teacher had seen enough wounds to know that the one Langer received should have been fatal. From the entry point of the bullet it should have torn his liver in two. They had left him for dead – no pulse, no sign of breath, no eye reflex. Langer was dead. But two days later he showed up again apparently none the worse for his wound, only complaining a little about minor stomach pains.

Langer's explanation was that the bullet had entered and exited cleanly, leaving only a puncture. Always sounded somewhat implausible to him, but they had been too busy staying in front of Ivan to worry much. They were glad enough to have him back no matter what the reason. Not until later did Teacher try to
analyze it, and it never made sense. The wound Langer had was a killing one, at best even if it had entered and left cleanly, it would still have torn him up inside from the shock wave effect that a high-velocity bullet always has on human tissue.

Teacher considered himself to be well educated and versed in history, which he taught in the Gymnasium in Cologne. But Langer would come out every now and then with a fragment of information that only scholars of ancient history would have been familiar with.
His ability to speak languages, even that of Yuri. He also knew the man's customs. Sometimes he spoke of the past as if it had just happened. Like the first winter of the retreat from Moscow. Teacher had told him he thought it must be as cold as when Napoleon had to retreat.

Langer had, offhandedly, said simply, "No, it was colder then."

A statement of fact, no more, no less, said with the conviction of one who knows for sure what he is talking about.

* * *

Gus shifted into neutral as Carl called down, "What the hell's going on? Where do you think you're going?"

"TANKS!" a youngster yelled back, panic at the edge of his voice. "The Russians are crossing the river! They've built a bridge just under the surface, and they're coming across, hundreds of them, Siberians!"

Langer forced the young corporal to climb on the tank with him, along with three other men, and guided them to the crossing. Manny tried to raise HQ on the radio, but all he got was static.

Teacher checked his 88, and Yuri took his position. He was ready to hand up, from the ammo racks, whichever shell might be needed, as they rumbled on toward the Russian penetration.

A short burst from the hull gun convinced the increasing numbers of fleeing soldiers that it would be wiser to return to their positions and face the oncoming Siberians than to be ground under the treads of their own tanks. From the expression on the tank commander's face, they had no doubt that that was exactly what he would do if they didn't obey his orders.

The massive steel leviathan escorting them helped to return some of their courage; they were soldiers again, not a fleeing mass of panic-stricken men.

A shadow loomed in the dark, and the Tiger's instant response blew the T-34 into a burning hulk, before Ivan had even spotted them.

The sight of the burning tank gave the German infantry new heart, and they moved forward under the protection of the Tiger's 88. Others from the dark woods began to join them, forming into groups, weapons at the ready. They were hunched figures flickering in the flames of the burning Russian tank.

Another T-34 came at them from the side, crashing out of the tree line, firing. Its 76 mm round hit the Tiger's turret at an angle; and even though they were no more than fifty meters apart, the shell ricocheted off to explode in the distance. Trees prevented the Tiger's crew from maneuvering or turning its gun to face the attacker.

The young corporal, who had been so terrified just moments before, leaped off the Tiger and ran to meet the advancing Russian. Halting by the body of one of the Pioneers that had been with him, he took the man's demolitions bag and opened it while running and twisting through the trees. When he tossed the bag away he held in his hands a
geballte Ladung
: a bundled charge of six grenade heads taped around the head of a complete stick grenade. Throwing himself to the earth in front of the T-34, he let the monster move over him as he had been taught at the training school at Kaiserslautern, and the steel bottom scraped his helmet as it passed. Immediately the youngster rose, pulled the igniter on the bundle charge, tossed it on the tanks rear deck, and threw himself to the side seeking shelter in the roots of trees.

The
geballte
blew with enough force to wreck the engine compartment, leaving the T-34 unable to move, but still dangerous. Its guns continued to fire and sweep over the Germans on the trail. The Russian crew fired and loaded faster than they had ever done in their lives.

A
Stabsgefreiter
from the Pioneers took advantage of the tank's blind spots and set a magnetic mine at the junction of hull and turret. Then he threw himself down beside the corporal, burying his face in the earth.

The Soviet monster died in less than a beat of a heart when the mine blew the turret open and exploded the ammo inside. The Germans had no time to congratulate themselves before their backs were ripped open by bursts from PPs 41s. The Russian infantry support was catching up, but without the aid of their comrades in the dead tank, the Germans made short work of them. With the aid of the Tiger's hull machine guns, Gus had finally worked the Tiger around where it could trace the enemy's route back.

The Russians hadn't fully exploited the river crossing. One of their tanks had stalled on the underwater bridge, and the others were lined up behind it, trying to push it off of the side when Langer's Tiger came on the scene. The Ivans were being aided in their effort to clear the bridge by Langer, when a round from his 88 blew the stalled tank clear from the bridge. Cursing as he realized his mistake in blasting the sitting duck free so that the others could come on, he fired again at the leading tank, aiming for the treads.

"FIRE!"

The round blew the Russian half on and half off the bridge. The crossing was barred again.

One T-34 after another was knocked out. After they hit the leading tank, he took out the rear. That left eight more stuck in the
center, unable to advance or withdraw. One by one they fell prey to the pinpoint fire of the lone Tiger opposing them. The German infantry was mopping up the few Siberians that had managed to get across. No prisoners were taken, they didn't have the time or the men to spare for such niceties. That, along with what their fellows suffered at the hands of the wild Asians, made their choice easy...

The opposite bank of the river burst into flashes of fire and smoke. Shells by the hundreds began to fall among the milling mass of Russian tanks that had been awaiting their turn to line up for the crossing. These monsters had been unable to lend any support to their comrades on the bridge. When Russian intelligence selected this site they did so because of the narrow defile leading to the crossing. It would aid in keeping their vehicles from being spotted from the air or opposite bank. This choice now made the defile a mass grave for hundreds of men as the combined artillery of three German batteries poured onto them. Someone had got through to HQ with the coordinates of the Russian attack, and was now calling down accurate fire on the congested Russian column. This attempt had been stopped, but there would be others.

Three days later, Field Marshal Eric von Manstein conferred the Knight's Cross on
Stabsfeldwebel
Langer, commander of the tank crew, and the Iron Cross first class on the rest of the crew.

Hanging the ribbon with its dangling cross around the sergeant's neck, the aristocratic field marshal gave the awardee a long strange look, as if there was something in the man's face that he was supposed to see, but somehow had missed.

The small formation had not been dismissed ten minutes before Gus was trying to sell his medal to a newly arrived member of a supporting Pioneer battalion which had been assigned to their area. Manfried was ecstatic with the thought of how proud his father would be. Teacher merely gave his to Yuri. The Tatar had been omitted at the ceremony, and Teacher didn't really give a rat's ass for any piece of tin; all he wanted from the war was out.

Autumn soon came with its changing
colors and hints of the snow that lay not far behind. The fields and trees were glorious in the kaleidoscope of colors that preceded the advent of the Russian winter.

The Russians continued their attempts to break through the forces on the Dnieper time and again. It seemed that they had a never-ending supply of men and material to throw against the defenders, who had less to resist them with every day. The snows came and gave the landscape a deceptive look of peace and
tranquility. The snow, a clean white sheet, covered the horrors of thousands of decaying bodies of men and horses; and it turned the burned-out shells of tanks into small white hills that dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see...

From that time on, until the first blast of November, they served as a fire brigade in one savage confrontation after another. Twice their Tiger had to be taken in for repairs that they couldn't handle in the fields; once for a complete engine overhaul, and another time to have the
transversing rings and rollers replaced. Other than that they had been lucky. But another winter was coming now; and flurries of snow in the morning and evening were harbingers of the white death that would soon sweep down on them. True, they were fairly well outfitted with winter gear and felt boots like those of the Russians, but their equipment wasn't designed with the tolerances of their Soviet counterparts. Their guns would still freeze up, the oil in the breeches would lock solid, trucks and cars that stopped in bad weather would have their blocks frozen solid, and men would die of carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to sleep in their vehicles while keeping the motors running.

The battalion was reformed. The faces of the replacements were younger every year, indeed every month. Faces like Manny's that would soon look older than their years, especially their eyes, old men's eyes in eighteen-year-old faces.

Nikopol was to their front about three or four kilometers, and just to the rear was the encampment of the Kalmyks. They, along with Heidemann's unit, had been assigned to the defense of Nikopol. The Kalmyks, along with their families, had fought fiercely alongside the Germans ever since 1942. They hated the Russians with a savagery that even the SS couldn't match.

They had left the Kalmyk steppes, with their wives and families driving their herds of horses before them. Now they served as scouts, and they specialized in rooting out partisans. They had stayed with the 16th Panzers all the way, and thought of the division as their own personal property and family, something to defend at all costs. They, and
Heidemann, were under the command of General of Mountain Troops, Ferdinand Schorner.

The German forces held a bridgehead in an arc seventy-five
kilometers across. Behind them ran the Dnieper, and on their southern flank was the Plavna, a swamp covering a larger area than their own perimeter; these swampy lowlands were the haunts of the partisans. Without the aid of the half-savage Kalmyk cavalry units, it would have been almost impossible to control the guerrillas in the morass of reeds and marsh.

Here they waited, fighting and dying until Father Winter finally proclaimed his mastery over the land. The great cold had come, and like the animals, those that could bury themselves in the earth did so to seek whatever shelter and warmth they could. Anything to keep out of the icy wind that froze a man's feet into blackened stumps, and sapped the will to live until one just sat down and quit, waiting for the peace that would come with freezing. Freezing wasn't so bad; the old-timers said that after a while you couldn't feel the cold, and then for a short time you were actually warm, and that was when death would come...

Langer sat, his eyes barely showing over the lip of the open turret hatch, trying to pierce the darkness. They were out there; every instinct told him that they were coming. It had been too quiet for the last few days, only scouting patrols had been intercepted. It was too quiet! Now he took the watch just before the hours of dawn, Ivan's favorite time to attack. That was when the body in sleep or repose took the longest time to get awake, when seconds meant the difference between life and death. His eyes blanked out. "Flares!"

The sounds reached him split seconds later, but he was already inside the hatch. The Russian barrage lit up the night, one long continuous rolling wave of fiery destruction. It rumbled across the frozen earth. It rolled over them, missing the sitting Tiger. Only the
spaaang of ricocheting shrapnel told them how close they had come to being destroyed.

The radio crackled,
Heidemann's voice breaking in. "All Panzers, start engines and move out, give support to the infantry, but don't tie yourselves down. If you have to leave them, we can't afford to lose any more armor. This is the Breakout: follow plan “C' to rendezvous; you're on your own, Ivan is hitting us too." The crackling of the radio stopped, there was no need for anything more to be said.

General
Schorner had been expecting this, and contrary to Hitler's orders of "Fight to the last man," he preferred to risk his own life and disobey the suicide orders to save his men. Strangely enough, the order for Breakout was, "Ladies, excuse me, please."

From the north, General
Chuykov's 8th Guards Army assaulted the rear of the bridgehead. It was the night of 31 January.

Langer's Tiger patrolled like a hungry wolf between the retreating German forces and the Russians hounding them, trying to keep the Soviet
armor off their back until they could break contact. Four times they had sent screeching rounds into advancing Russian tanks, sending them and their crews to eternity.

Everything was in confusion until they could join the main force between the river and
Apostolovo. There the situation stabilized, as the German units added their strength to those already there. The uncommon warm spell of the last week had turned the ground from ice to the knee-deep clinging mud that bogged down tanks and trucks. Infantrymen had to tie strips of canvas around their legs to keep their boots from being pulled off by the sucking mud.

Exhausted men, who could go no further, died from suffocation when they
fell face first into it, sinking out of sight so that their bodies were not seen by those who marched over them.

Langer wrapped his olive-
colored scarf around his lower mouth and nose, leaving only the eyes exposed to the whipping, icy wind. Outside the bunker, the shock of the cold snatched his breath. The whirling winds of snow had covered everything in a clean blanket of virgin white that covered, at least for the time, the horrors that lay beneath them. A distant flickering in the sky lit up the darkness, like a burning star...

Flares.
The storm was no guarantee that Ivan wouldn't come across the frozen fields. The temperature had dropped from twenty above to forty below zero. He had seen a snap freeze like this once before, during the retreat from Moscow, the cold that comes so fast that you don't know that it's killing you.

He had come upon a small group of Cossacks. The snow was waist high, and several were mounted. For a moment, he started to fire, until he saw that there were no frozen wisps of breath coming from them, or their animals. One of the riders held a cigarette in hand, head bending over slightly,
ready to light it with a match that had blown away. All were dead in the act of living. Langer figured that it had happened three days earlier, when a snap freeze came across the plains from Siberia.

That, with the seventy mile an hour winds, brought a chill factor of over a hundred below zero, so cold that it froze the fluids servicing the brain. It came fast, the white death, so fast that you never knew it. As you were, so you died, asleep or awake. This night was like that, not as cold perhaps, but cold enough to kill over a thousand men on both sides before the dawn would come.

Small flickers in the night showed where crews of tanks built small fires under their vehicles to keep the engines from freezing solid. Antifreeze didn't help. Machine gunners heated bricks red hot and put them on the breeches of the weapons to prevent them from locking up if they had to be used. The bricks had to be changed every ten minutes.

Heaving his way through the knee-deep white, breath
laboring and aching, he looked for Manny, trying to find his bearings to the outpost. It was only a hundred and fifty meters from the bunker, but it took over twenty minutes to make it, fighting the wind and drifts.

Stooping over, he moved the canvas covering aside, letting a blast of arctic air enter with him. The wind almost blew out the tin-can stove which served only to keep the worst of the cold out. Gus grumbled at the incursion; he was at the aperture, searching out the Russian side of the field through a pair of artillery range-finding glasses. The opening was packed with rags around the lenses, which he had to wipe off every couple of minutes to keep them from icing up.

"Goddamn, Sarge, it's about time! Where is Manny? I thought that he was supposed to relieve me!”

"He never showed?"

Concern erased Gus's habitual cynicism. "No, he hasn't been here. Then he's still out there!" Gus started to move past Langer and was stopped by a gloved hand.

"No, you stay here. I'll backtrack and see if I can find him. Maybe he holed somewhere with another crew. You stay and keep an eye on the front, unless you feel a desire to have the Siberians play games with you. Remember Moscow..."

Unwillingly, Gus conceded and returned to the lenses. "Find him, Carl, please."

That was the first time, the only
time, that Langer had ever heard Gus say please to anyone.

Back in the dark, the wind was trying to cut through to the skin. Ice built up on his eyebrows and collected in the hair of his lids, trying to squeeze them shut and close
them forever, as it had done to so many others in this waste of frozen nightmares.

CRUMP! CRUMP! The dull thumping explosions of incoming mortar rounds walked over the earth. Langer threw himself beside a broken tree, sinking down, face forward,
into the drift built around the base of the tree the height of a man's waist.

The barrage walked on searching out anything it could kill. Langer rose to his knees, lungs aching, and leaned against the trunk of the shell-wrecked tree.

Something in the shape of the drift piled up on the base of the tree bothered him. A fresh burst of wind came across the fields from the north. A gust blew past his face and whipped at the drift he was looking at, blowing a piece of crust off the top. A helmet top. A coldness gripped his insides, but it wasn't caused by the wind. Using his glove, he wiped away the snow from the helmet and face, knowing what he would find, but hoping that he was wrong. Manny's face stared out from its glowing white cover. The eyes were wide open, his face calm, no trace of fear or of anxiety, looking as if he had just stopped to rest and think for a moment and was forever frozen in that state. Ice crusted around his eyes and. mouth made him look older than his nineteen years. Langer moved the rest of the snow from him and picked up what used to be Manfried Ertl. The body was frozen solid in the sitting position. Langer struggled back to the bunker carrying his burden; the wind blew on, uncaring. Manfried was of no importance, only one more to be added to the roll call of the greatest of Russian killers – General Winter. Laying his burden on the snow on its side by the bunker, Langer went inside. There was no need to bring Manny in to thaw. The cold would keep him until they could bury him.

An infantry company of SS, moving up under the cover of darkness, died in its steps. 155 mm shells set to explode in the air picked their spot to do so directly over the SS men. The concussion killed more than shrapnel. The company looked as if they had just lain down to catch some sleep.

Langer and his crew tried to pull themselves deeper into the dirt floor of their bunker. There was nothing they could do to fight back, they just had to take it. They slept only when exhaustion finally claimed them. Even the shaking of the frozen earth was not enough to keep their grime laden eyelids open. They slept unmindful of the hell that raged around them.

Manny's body was no longer a problem; a 105 shell had disposed of it forever.

German sentries on the forward observation posts were the first to know that hell was on its way. From the distance, winking eyes of light joined together until there was one continuous rim of flashing illuminations, setting the horizon on fire. Then came the screaming of the shells. The Russian offensive had begun! Over a thousand pieces of artillery, and hundreds of multiple rocket launchers pounded a three-mile section of the front for five days, twenty-four hours around the clock without cease. Russian gunners and crews worked themselves to death, hearts breaking under the strain of loading their guns with the heavy shells. As they fired, many lost their hearing forever. The shells fell in hundreds and thousands, over a hundred rounds fired for every German in the target area. Men and animals died. The screaming of the horses, wild-eyed and trembling, was worse than that of the men. Eardrums were shattered, blood running from the ears to freeze in blackened clots on the side of the face.

A seventeen-year-old private, who had been on the front for only three days when the barrage began, stuck the muzzle of his
Mauser rifle into his mouth and pulled the trigger with the aid of a stick. Many more took his way out of the nightmare. Others by the dozens merely walked away, no longer able to cope. The pounding, interminable concussions ripping their minds apart and sent them stumbling back slack jawed, hands dangling at their sides or holding their heads trying to keep out the sounds. They staggered to the rear, only to find peace at the hands of the SD. Like children they cried and obeyed when they were told to kneel, still holding their hands over their ears to keep out the sounds of distant thunder. They didn't even hear the neck shots fired by their comrades that finally took the nightmares away.

Russians came by the tens of thousands, white winter camouflage mixed with mustard brown. They swarmed into the gap, killing the still stunned Germans by the hundreds before the Fascists even knew they were there. In their ears they still heard the thunder. For the Russians, it was inconceivable that anyone could survive the hell of fire that they had laid on, much less be able to fight when it stopped.