Initiative (The Red Gambit Series Book 6) (43 page)

The screams pierced Parker’s concentration and he instinctively turned his head, just catching the red mist aftermath left by a mortar shell that destroyed two men working on the track of a nearby Super Pershing.

He had made a command decision.

Threatened by the advance of numerous enemy tanks, he should have withdrawn, but too many of his tanks had been disabled by mines, and to withdraw meant leaving them to be overrun and knocked out.

So, Nathaniel Parker elected to stay and fight, moving his remaining running tanks to the left flank.

His reasoning was sound.

He moved to cover the flank of the infantry, ensuring that the advancing enemy tanks had to deal with his unit first. Parker also gave at least part of his unit better angles on the approaching enemy vehicles.

He also hoped to move around the minefield, opening up his manoeuvre possibilities.

With the courage of desperate men, the disabled Pershings started to claim victims amongst the jinking T34s.

“Move up, nice and slow, stay tight.”

The group of seven tanks obeyed, moving ahead of their stranded comrades, changing the angles as Parker knew the move would.

The lead T34 responded, changing direction and hurtling towards his group, exposing a larger target to attack from the side.

The disabled Super Pershings needed no second invitation.

A shell went straight through the target, apparently without causing any real damage.

A second shell brought the now smoking tank to an immediate halt, and the crew abandoned under fire from coaxial machine guns.

A flash overhead heralded the arrival of more air support, and the smoking tank disintegrated as two rockets hit it flat on, sending metal in all directions.

The IS-IIIs commander, call sign Uchitel-zero, called his vehicles to cease fire, thus avoiding attracting swift retribution from the air.

The handful of static and mobile flak weapons available to the Russian force did what they could, and that was next to nothing, the nearest thing to victory a minor damage hit on one of the latest attackers, a Thunderbolt, which lost part of a wingtip as it wheeled away from delivering its rockets.

A clang announced a direct hit on the hull of Parker’s tank, but the solid shot soared skywards as the heavy plate resisted its attention.

Soon, the smell of faeces and urine reached the turret crew.

‘Father’ had lost control of both bowels and bladder with the fright of the impact.

No one said anything.

They had all been there before themselves.

Parker’s manoeuvre had worked, after a fashion, as the advancing tanks concentrated more on the running vehicles than those disabled in the minefield, which meant that the stationery vehicles enjoyed easier shots on their enemy.

The aircraft circled the battlefield, seeking employment, but conscious of the close proximity of the two armoured units.

Impatient, as only airmen can be, the USAAF pilots welcomed the unexpected arrival of some Mikoyans, and pursued the terrified Soviet pilots as far as they could.

It was an error.

Yatzhin seized the moment.

“Kukhnya-Zero, Uchitel-Zero, open fire on the mobile group immediately. Kill them all! Out.”

The silent IS-IIIs had been tracking their targets, waiting for the moment of release.

With the advantage of height, they fired, and their AP shells angled down on the Pershings, negating much of the slant of their armour.

“Fuck! Incom…”

Parker recoiled from the hatch and tensed as the white blob ate up the distance from tank to tank in the briefest of moments and arrived before he completed his warning.

Kerangg!

A wave of heat and sound assaulted every member of the crew.

Kerangg!

A second shot struck home.

Screaming…

“Shut the fuck up, father!”

It wasn’t father.

It was Middlemass, the driver, who had broken both ankles as the heavy shell had struck the front hull and the shock wave had travelled through all things metal until finding his vulnerable bones tensed against the pedals.

Kerangg!

The screams stopped and the metallic tang of blood and bone filled the inside of the tank.

The solid shot had punched through the plate and ploughed through the screaming driver on its way into the floor pan.

It did not explode.

Parker knew he was hurt, the blood flow down his head quickly impairing his vision, but not enough for him to fail to notice he no longer had a cupola.

The whole thing had been stripped away by the first hit and he had daylight above him.

“Everyone ok? Talk to me!”

Acknowledgements of different types came back from all but Middlemass, with only Dewey sounding in control of himself.

“I’m on, Major.”

“Take ‘em out. I can’t see a fucking thing.”

The 90mm sent its reply towards its tormentors, but the IS-III it struck proved resilient.

Kerangg!

Another shell struck the front upper edge of the turret and disappeared off into the remains of the German village, doing further mischief amongst armored infantrymen waiting to advance,

“Gun’s fucked! Major, the gun’s fucked! No elevation.”

The barrel had dropped dramatically, pointing to the ground and it refused to respond to any adjustments.

The external stabiliser springs had been carried away, and the shock wave had done other damage to the gun mount.

Parker immediately knew the right thing to do.

“Shit! Abandon tank!”

Needing no second invitation, the four survivors bailed out.

Four became three as Rogers, the loader, took a bullet in the back of the head and dropped lifeless on the engine grilles.

The IS-IIIs were in the ascendency, and another of Parker’s tanks erupted in a storm of orange and red.

Parker checked his remaining two men, one of whom was wounded, one of which was terrified out of his skin.

Leaving Dewey in charge, the blood-covered Major Parker sprinted to the nearest tank and dropped in behind it, liberating the handset to the squawk box.

On the inside of the tank, the young Lieutenant was wholly glad to receive orders to withdraw, and lost no time in passing the instructions to the survivors.

Parker moved away and watched as the remnants of his mobile force worked their way backwards… still engaging… still fighting... face to the enemy.

He nodded in silent praise at the way the three tanks worked as a team. Pulling out his Colt automatic, he ran back to where he had left his two crewmen, but found the position empty.

A quick scan revealed no clue as to their whereabouts, but he had other fish to fry in any case.

The sound of aero engines made him look skyward, and he was rewarded with the sight of the returning aircraft, who immediately renewed their attack on the Soviet positions, including the IS-IIIs who now started to suffer casualties.

Leaping from rubble to rubble, hole to hole, he moved closer to the nearest surviving disabled Super Pershing, intent on organising the resistance or salvaging what he could of the unit, whichever needed to be done.

Gauging the distance to the rear of the disabled tank, Parker made the final sprint and flopped onto the ground in its shadow.

Underneath him, a Type 43 Riegel bar mine sensed the pressure. Normally it would not have been enough to detonate, Parker’s weight being less than the designated one hundred and eighty kilos down force.

However, that did not matter to the unstable mine.

Four kilos of TNT exploded in an instant, spreading parts of Parker over the rear of the Pershing, and numerous points beyond.

Yatzhin, dismounted from his tank, watched in a rage as his second and third companies withdrew in disarray.

His rage was not aimed at his poor soldiers, who had given all they could, but at the Allied airmen, who once again had saved the day for his enemy.

He swivelled his binoculars and exercised a studied calm as he noted the smoking ruins of all but four of the IS-IIIs, most destroyed by the enemy aircraft that continued to circle the battlefield.

Just to confirm his recollections of the swift but merciless air attack, he sought out the blackened and smoking hole on the side of Height 424, the site of the sole success against the fliers who had plagued his command.

A single Thunderbolt had succumbed to his AA defence, and had driven straight into the hillside.

Yatzhin dropped the binoculars to his chest and took a deep breath to clear his mind.

His orders had been discharged, and the enemy assaults on the two key heights had been repulsed, the Cossacks on Height 424 having recaptured the high ground when the tanks in the valley had started to withdraw.

However, he had lost the majority of his command in the process, and a second push by any substantial enemy force would carry them through and beyond his positions in a matter of a few moments.

The US artillery started up again, harrying his withdrawing tanks, as well as bringing discomfort to the cavalrymen repairing their positions on Height 424.

He envied the matériel available to his enemy, his own supply situation tenuous at best, at worst a nothingness that forecast solely disaster for the Red Army.

Yatzhin snorted, totally without humour, assuring himself that the only reason he would have a full load of ammunition on his tank was that he now had less tanks to supply.

“Blyad.”

“Comrade Mayor?”

“Nothing, Comrade
Praporshchik
, nothing.”

“Right, pack up and prepare to move back. I’m returning to my tank.”

Neither he, nor the
Praporshchik
, or the rest of the headquarters group heard it.

None the less, it was very real.

The shell had been fired by an M43 Self-propelled gun, sporting a heavy M115 8” howitzer.

It was the first shot the unit had fired that day, and the most effective.

The two hundred pound shell struck directly on Yatzhin’s command tank, sending vicious pieces of sharp metal in all directions.

The Major felt as if he had been kicked in the belly, but his attention was mainly drawn to the
Praporshchik
, who simply fell into four large loosely connected pieces, as shards of metal scythed through his body.

The screams and wails of those hit by life-taking metal filled his senses.

A wall of flame washed over him as his smashed tank and crew were immolated before his eyes.

The shock wave lifted him up and sent him flying backwards, smashing through something that could only have been another human being, before he came to rest in a bush thirty yards from where he had been standing.

Still he felt no pain, but he was fascinated by the silver-grey entrails that spread from his riven stomach back down the path he had just been thrown.

His belly had been sliced open, as neat and precise as if done by a top surgeon, allowing his stomach and organs to come tumbling out and drag in the earth.

His back started to protest first, a number of teeth and parts of a jawbone buried in his kidney area, pieces of the young radio operator he had smashed into during his rearward flight.

And then, like a tidal wave, the pain came and robbed him of his senses.

Yatzhin screamed…

…and screamed…

…and screamed…

He was still screaming when the medical detail recovered his intestines, washed them clean with water, before bagging them as best they could, and carrying the hideously wounded officer away.

What happened at Fulda, and around Lehnerz and Niesig, was a microcosm of the American front.

A battle that produced nothing but dead and maimed men, smashed equipment, expenditure of supplies, and little to show for it militarily, save for a few feet of ground, one way or the other.

In just over an hour of combat, forty-eight tanks, six anti-tank guns, twenty-nine assorted vehicles, and one aircraft had been destroyed or put out of action.

Combined casualties amounted to six hundred and seventy dead, with a similar number wounded.

The Soviet plan to inflict casualties upon the Americans was working, as the US generals knew only too well.

The Red Army’s own casualties were horrendous, but the USSR did not suffer from the diseases of freedom and democracy, as Stalin was want to put it.

Despite the losses, Fulda was insignificant in the greater run of things, or so it seemed, because one particular loss proved to be the catalyst for significant events in the American capital.

Some weeks later, well after the battle, the family of Sergeant Art Dewey received the confirmation that he had been killed in action, his remains, and those of Priest, eventually found amongst the smashed rubble of Lehnerz.

They were one of many families that received such notifications in the month of August 1946.

The difference was that Arthur Lawrence Dewey was the son of Thomas Edmund Dewey, Governor of New York and the defeated Republican presidential candidate in the ’44 election, a man who was an established anti-intervention politician, a man now in mourning, and a man supplied with the full facts of the pointless nature of his son’s death in front of Height 424 near Fulda.

A man who developed a thirst for retribution, and a specific idea on how it could be achieved.

And so it was that a relatively unimportant battle became a pivotal point in the European War or, more accurately, the political war at home.