Blitzfreeze (13 page)

I go at 4 o’clock tomorrow.
With a German Weidersehen.
Helmut Wenzel, SS-Sturmmann.
P.S. You can all kiss my arse!

‘For emphasis he had drawn two swastikas one on each side of his name. A political philosopher amongst the inmates of Cell 9 had written on the ceiling:

What is Marxism in reality?
It is National Socialism’s non-aryan
grandmother!

‘Now we three were sitting here, in this pleasant cell with its sad memories, enjoying ourselves so much that the prisoners on the other three floors sent a collective complaint to the Garrison Commander about the noise we were making after lights-out. The party widened and became even noisier with the arrival of Hauptfeldwebel Putkammer. He was on his way home from a wedding after being thrown out for having three times attempted to rape the bride: once during the meat course; once after the dessert; and the third time in the bath-tub. He rang the bell at the door and demanded entrance in a loud, commanding voice. Nobody heard him, and he knocked again with the point of his sabre. He was in full dress uniform.

‘Still getting no answer he threw a stone through a window and fired three shots into the air, shooting down the official blue light over the entrance door.

‘We named him prisoner-of-honour in Cell 9.

Deutschland, Deutschland, ohne alles,
ohne Butter, ohne Speck,
und das bisschen Marmelade
frisst uns die Verwaltung weg
.
⁴

‘Our song echoed back from the stables on the other side of the square where the dragoons slept with their horses.

‘“Brothers, we meet at last on the scaffold,” shouted the Haupfeldwebel, beating his breast.

‘
Dulce est decipere in loco
.
⁵
Later on he got rough and
claimed we were a pack of rogues who were leading him astray.

‘On the fourth day the padre visited us and to please our benefactor we agreed to be confirmed. It was such a solemn affair that the transport man got an attack of sobbing and grunted like a pig. The service was conducted in the Garrison Church. The CO was furious when he heard about it and gave us eight days extra for making fun of the Church. The padre was posted to a far distant and very grim border town. He excommunicated us just before he climbed onto the train.

‘“By God, I’ll confirm you,” our Oberst promised us on CO’s orders. “More than you’ll fancy too. I’ll cram your prayer-books down your gullets and haul ’em up and down again on a piece of barbed wire, you wicked men!”’

In closely-packed sections the khaki figures of Russian infantry swarm across the steppe. Thousands upon thousands of them. A wave of humanity sweeping forward through the waving grass. The field-grey German infantry looks insignificant in comparison with these enormous brown hordes. They press forward with fixed bayonets taking no apparent notice of our concentrated machine-gun fire.

Our infantry are retreating in panic from their positions. Officers try to stop them. German bullets kill German soldiers, but nothing can stop the fear-maddened flight from the trenches. Officers who stand their ground are trodden into the earth.

It’s no longer the Fatherland we are fighting for but our very lives. Red flares shoot up signalling to the artillery. A barrage of unbelievable power hammers down in front of the Russian regiments. Hundreds of machine-guns stammer tracer into the advancing hordes.

Our company takes cover behind a tile-works. Shells sweep the steppe like fiery brooms.

We move our tanks slowly forward up onto a height from which we can observe clearly many miles to the west. In the distance Russian troops can be seen marching in close column.

In a wide V-formation the tanks move forward, without infantry support, crunching through walls and ruins. Our machine-guns spit continuously. A horse-drawn battery runs away. The guns swing crazily behind the horses, until these fall under the rain of shells and guns and limbers go flying over them to land in a tangled heap of metal, wood and human and animal flesh. The ventilators hum softly, sucking acrid powder fumes out of our combat cabin. Sack after sack of casings is emptied out of the hatches. The tank shakes and shivers from the continuous shocks of firing. We are in the grip of a kind of hunting fever; laugh when we see we’ve made a hit. We have no thought of the fact that we are killing human beings. Time stands still. The heat is unbearable. It’s an unusually hot autumn day. Have we been fighting one hour or five? We’ve no idea.

Infantry fire drums deafeningly against the vehicle’s steel sides. Several times tank-killers try to get alongside us with magnetic bombs but we see them and our flame throwers burn them to cinders.

‘Enemy tank attack!’ comes the alarm from the loudspeaker. Three or four hundred T-34s come crawling up over the hills away towards the horizon. With a terrific crash the regiment opens fire with all guns. The earth flames. The leading T-34s go up in an inferno of fire and smoke but very shortly terribly many P-IVs are exploding into whitely glowing bonfires. Black oily smoke climbs up towards the clear blue of the heavens.

Shell after shell leaves the long barrels of the guns to bore whiningly into the mass of enemy tanks.

More and more tanks on both sides explode and break apart.

Only a few crews get away. Most of them die in the flames. This is the lot of the tank soldier.

Suddenly the enemy tanks turn and disappear at full speed over the hills. For a moment we believe they are running from us but we soon see what they are after. They swing round again and roll without stopping through out thinly-manned
infantry positions a few miles to the north. They are using German tactics. Punch through where resistance is least. To put it short: Blitzkrieg!

Oberst Hinka sees the danger at once and gives the order for immediate withdrawal.

‘Panzer withdraw. March, march!’

The boys in the trenches are left to their fate. The tanks leave as fast as their tracks can take them.

We stop for a moment to pick up wounded. They are piled up on our rear shielding in layers, more like sacks of flour than human beings. There is no time to be careful. They can thank their stars they are being moved at all.

They lie all over us. On the front shields, on the turret, on the runway, where they need almost superhuman strength to hold on as the tank bounces and slithers over the uneven terrain.

‘Comrades, take us with you!’ they scream to us, those whom we must leave behind. ‘Don’t leave us!’ Pleadingly they stretch their hands out towards us.

We look the other way and they disappear in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes as Porta puts on speed. There is no room for more on the vehicle and if we get into combat those who
are
aboard will be sitting ducks for the enemy MGs.

At a terrific pace we crash through brush and ditches. The 25 ton P-IV sways like a ship in a rough sea.

Without slackening speed we smash straight through an artillery park. We can just make out the dust of the regiment far in front of us. It is a race with death. If the pincers close on us before we get through they’ll be able to shoot us down like clay pigeons.

‘Faster, faster!’ comes continually from the loud-speaker. We stop to take Barcelona’s damaged tank on tow. The wire breaks with a whining howl and the back lash chops the head off one of ‘our’ wounded. A Feldwebel. Sweating and cursing we make a new wire fast. With Barcelona’s P-III on tow behind us we roll through a burning village at considerably reduced speed.

The artillery has done a job here. Bloody heaps of human meat lie everywhere. Flies, millions of them, rise in great buzzing swarms as we roll over the bodies. The stench is sickening.

Just outside the village a T-34 with its tracks shot off sends a shell to us. Barcelona’s P-III is hit. Tracks and rollers damaged. Without thinking of the wounded aboard us I swing the gun around, and sight down on the enemy tank. Our shell rips away its turret. Two men jump out and are cut down by Heide’s MG. One of them drops by the tracks, the other drops at the rear of the tank. He tries to crawl away but a string of tracer chases and catches him. The P-III is finished. The cable breaks in three places when we try to move it. Barcelona and his crew come over to us. Tiny throws a couple of grenades into the P-III and in a moment it goes up in flames.

With rattling tracks we disappear across the steppe, engine revving at top speed. Nothing but speed and surprise tactics can save us now. Over the air we can hear Oberst Hinka chewing the company commander up for having got his 38 ton Skoda caught fast in a marsh. He thought he could take a short-cut along the river. It might have come off with a P-IV, which has broader tracks than a Skoda.

‘We’ll try to pick you up tomorrow with a rescue truck,’ shouts the CO irritably. ‘You’ll stay with the vehicle overnight, Moser!’

‘That’s his death warrant,’ says Porta carelessly. ‘He should never have reported getting caught with his backside in a marsh. Cleverer people would’ve blown the wagon, and then blown the coop smartly with a soldiers’ farewell to Ivan. Afterwards a nice little report stating that a T-34 had smacked ’em in the eye with a shell. Luckily they haven’t started checking our reports with the enemy yet, but they probably
will
do some day.’

‘You have no feeling for your duty,’ shouts Heide reproachfully. ‘One does not blow up one’s vehicle excepting in a case of the utmost necessity!’

‘I’ve noted it,’ grins Porta superciliously. ‘But don’t cry, mister Party hero, if
we
suddenly drop in the shit and are short a piece of track. It’ll be interesting watching you play tag with our friends the enemy.’

‘Cut out the negative thinking,’ protests Tiny, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Let’s talk about somethin’ positive like, for example, pussy.’

We thunder down a sunken road straight into a horse-drawn artillery unit. Soldiers and horses scatter in wild panic away from the tank which thunders forward spitting tracer from both MGs.

Porta goes head-down for a howitzer parked between two houses. Three artillery men are sitting petrified on its carriage with full bowls in their hands. One of them has a spoon in his mouth. They have apparently been surprised during a meal break. Everything disappears, crunched under the tracks.

In the rear-view mirrors we can see them crawling around on the ground and sending curses after us.

‘Goddam and blast it all!’ howls Porta soon after. ‘She’s going for a bloody burton! You can’t even trust the engines these twisting Nazi manufacturers turn out!’

‘What’s happened!’ asks the Old Man nervously.

‘She’s dropping her revs like a Jew on his way in to an SS-barracks,’ answers Porta kicking angrily at the gear lever.

Quickly we pull the cowling off the motor. We can’t find anything wrong. Everything we test seems to be working properly.

‘Come down here,’ shouts Porta pulling at my foot, ‘but God help
you
if this coffin stalls or if you strip my gears!’

Roughly they throw me into Porta’s seat to take over his job at the steering levers. From sheer nervousness I drive the wagon straight into a deep ditch and come close to tipping it over.

Porta and Heide go at the motor.

‘The devil!’ says the Old Man pulling at his ear. ‘And this
has to happen on our way to a break-through between two attacking enemy columns. It couldn’t be worse!’

‘Oh I wouldn’t say that,’ answers Porta. ‘I’d rather have a motor on the blink than a T-34 shell up my backside.’

‘Call the Legionnaire,’ the Old Man orders Heide. ‘Tell him to stop and take us on tow.’

But the Legionnaire continues up over a height without hearing the wireless signal. At the same moment his P-IV explodes. A blue-white flame shoots high into the air. A hatch cover flies like a thrown discus far out over the steppe.

To our relief we see the Legionnaire and the Professor jump from the hatch. The three others are caught in the exploding hell inside the tank. It looks like a blast-furnace at work. The sound reaches us a little later like a long roll of thunder.

Porta is right inside the motor, hammering and screwing away. It sounds as if he is trying to smash the Maybach to pieces. In between he curses the Russians, the Party and in particular Julius Heide.

‘It’s all your bloody fault,’ he shouts from the bowels of the engine.

‘If your rotten bloody Party’d stuck to drinking beer in the Bürgerbräukeller instead of playing at politics we wouldn’t have had any bloody war at all and I’d never have seen the inside of a bloody Maybach.
There’s
where
you
go you little bent-up prick!’ Two thundering clangs and a burnt-out valve flies towards Heide’s head.

‘That’s it,’ he mumbles finally and worms his way out of the motor. The Maybach purrs like a pleased cat.

We’re off again and without stopping we drag the Legionnaire and the Professor up and into the cabin.

Russian machine-gun fire sweeps away the last of our wounded.

‘Shall we stop and pick them up?’ asks the Old Man uncertainly.

‘Can’t be done,’ says Porta. ‘The accelerator’s stuck fast,
and will continue to be so until I see nice square German heads around me again!’