Authors: Sven Hassel
‘Panzer, forward march!’ comes over the communicator.
Maybach engines roar thunderously.
The Old Man pulls his goggles down over his eyes. From the wood comes distant sounds of armed contact. Our grenadiers have run into the enemy infantry. Field artillery
ploughs up the defence positions and soon they are nothing but heaps of clay and stone.
‘We should never have gone into Russia,’ sighs Stege pessimistically and fits a new belt into the machine-gun. He is always pessimistic before going into combat.
MGs chatter madly and 80 mm mortars spit their bombs towards the machine-gun posts.
‘Plop! plop!’ sounds incessantly. Geysers of earth spout up all around us. A polished track runs straight as a ruler along the edge of the wood and disappears in a milky curtain covering the village of Pocinok. We have never been in Pocinok but we know every inch of it. We know where they have positioned their PAK
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without being told. If they have tanks they’ll be dug in behind the school. The ideal position. They don’t even need to dig them in. With our short-range equipment we can’t touch their heavy KW-1s and -2s. The PAK will be next to Party HQ and the Komsomol
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. Party HQ is the last thing they abandon.
Gods, how it rains! Rain is coming in through the gasventilators. If rain can get through them gas can too! Involuntarily I look towards my gas-mask hanging over by the periscope. It has two filters. One of them has been used for distilling spirits and smells sweetly of alcohol. It ought to be a great help in a gas attack. You’d be half cut before you’d even noticed you were choking on chlorine.
At the roadside, half in the ditch, a lorry lies on its side. One of the big three-axled heavy artillery jobs. Its howitzers have been blown over into the orchard. One wheel has disappeared completely. The strike has torn up a whole row of fruit-trees. Ripe apples are lying everywhere. 1941 was a good year for fruit. The apple-pickers had been hard at work when the air-borne mine arrived. A ladder has been cut across as neatly as if with a circular saw. An apple-girl has been blasted inextricably into it. She has been blown almost completely out of her clothes. One shoe hangs from her left
foot and a piece of amber on a chain is still round her neck. A piece of a rung has gone through her stomach and sticks out of her back. Dead artillerymen lie around the lorry. One of them still clutches a bottle of wine in his hand. He met death in the middle of a swig.
By the gate lies the body of a German infantryman. He cannot be more than seventeen years of age. Both fists are buried in his entrails as if he were trying to retain them. His ribs are bared. They look like polished ivory. In the black crater, blasted by the mine, water chuckles pleasantly, washing away blood and torn remnants of humanity.
‘Odd how wars always start in the autumn, and how they slow down in the spring,’ Porta philosophies. ‘Wonder why?’
When summer begins to wane war begins in all seriousness. Then the infantry skirmishing is over. It usually starts with the sound of engines starting up night after night over on the other side.
Suddenly, just before some dawn, things start to move. The first twenty-four hours are always the worst. There are so many casualties. After a couple of days things begin to ease off. Not because the war itself gets any easier. Just the opposite. What happens is that we get used to living with death.
During the last three weeks fresh troops have been pouring in. Night and day boots have marched past our white castle. Companies, battalions, regiments, divisions. In the beginning we watched them curiously. They smelt of France. We all longed to be back in France. Then we were wealthy. Porta and Tiny did big business. In partnership with a Marineobermaat they once sold a fully-armed torpedo-boat. Tiny reckoned on receiving an English decoration when the war was over. The two shady gentlemen who had bought the torpedo-boat had promised him one.
We thunder through the village without meeting resistance. The heat from the exhaust makes us sleepy. Porta has the greatest of difficulty in keeping the heavy tank moving straight between the lines of troops marching on both sides
of the road. A moment’s inattention and he could flatten an entire company.
Our own infantry are lying on the back of the tank half-unconscious from the carbon-monoxide. It is dangerous to lie on top of the engine between the two big exhaust-pipes, but they still do it. It’s so lovely and warm.
Tiny sprawls on his ammunition and curses in his sleep. His snores are almost enough to drown the noise of the motor. Four fat lice race across his face. They are the rare kind with cross-markings on their backs. They are said to be particularly dangerous.
They give us a Deutschmark for every good specimen we turn in to the medical orderly. He puts them in a test-tube and sends them to Germany. We’ve never found out what they do with them back there. Porta has a theory that they wind up in a concentration camp for lice in which scientists are attempting to breed a special Aryan louse just intelligent enough to lift its front legs in the Nazi salute if Adolf should happen to pass by. Heide walked off in disgust when this theory was promulgated. The Old Man wakes Tiny and informs him of the fortune he has running around on him. He manages to catch three, but the fourth, and largest, specimen drops onto Porta’s neck. Naturally, he immediately declares it his personal property. They pin them to the rubber of the periscope mounting, ready to hand over when they run across the medical orderly.
A colossal orange fire-ball springs upwards with unbelievable force from the bushes close to the leading P-IV. The Panzer infantry throw themselves from the vehicles and take cover. With frightened eyes and hammering hearts they wait for death. An automatic cannon sprays the terrain. 20 mm projectiles ricochet from the steel sides of the tanks. A great wall of fire rises up in front of us. A flaming roller-curtain rolling the wrong way. It comes from the woods, shoots skyward in thousands of coruscating colour nuances, bends forward, and falls in our direction.
‘Stalin Organ,’ mumbles Heide frightenedly, and ducks reflexively under the Funker-MG.
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In a long-drawn horrifying thunder the rockets fall. Buildings are literally shaved off the face of the earth.
‘Panzer, forward march!’ snarls a hoarse voice through the speaker. But before the drivers can get into gear, the next salvo falls.
Porta speeds up his motor. We burst forward through mud and water. The Maybach screams at full power. Tracks whip at the mud, throwing great clods of earth high into the air.
In Spas-Demensk the streets are all ablaze. As we pass a large house the roof falls inwards and a rain of sparks and burning wood is thrown out over the Panzer column. A piece of burning wood falls through the hatch of our tank and sets fire to a pack. A sugar factory burns with a blinding white flame. Immediately after we have passed it a sugar-tank explodes and sprays glowing sugar far and wide. A P-III explodes right in the middle of the boiling mass.
The Panzer column halts for a moment and the guns roar. Burst-flames spring up everywhere. Artillery, grenade-throwers, machine-guns and tanks in a hell of death and destruction.
Shovels and picks ring. The wide tracks scream deafeningly. Tanks move slowly forward through fallen walls and twisted girders. Thick strangling smoke covers them.
The forward units guide us by wireless. No other army in the world is so well-trained in keeping contact as is the German. We even maintain contact with the heavy artillery far behind us. Our 75 mm guns cannot touch the giant Russian KW-2s, and our tactic is to hang on to them, worry them, smash their tracks until they cannot move, and then call on the heavy artillery and direct its fire by wireless until the giant is smashed.
No. 1. Battalion is in contact with the enemy trenches and PAK. Hordes of blood-spattered soldiers rush past us on the road. Our infantry has already suffered terrible losses.
Step by step we move forward. Porta takes his cue from the exhaust flame of the lead-tank. A frightful explosion shatters a P-III. It lights up with a blueish flame, then breaks up and disappears in a coal-black blanket of smoke. Trails of tracer hasten questingly towards the enemy position.
A BT-6
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comes charging out from a side-road. It shoots up over an earthwork into the air and lands again with a deafening crash ramming a P-III and turning it on its side. It spins like a top and makes for us.
I just manage to catch it in the periscope and fire without aiming. Our shell bursts on the turret in a shower of sparks. With a crash both tanks ram one another, and we tumble around inside our vehicle.
The Old Man tears open the hatch and pops up simultaneously with the commander of the BT-6. The Old Man is quickest. He fires first. Tiny springs from the side door with an S-mine clutched in his hands. He scrambles across the tanks and lobs his mine through the BT-6’s open hatch. Seconds later fire jets from its slits and it becomes a heap of junk.
With the help of tow-wires the Legionnaire pulls us free of the wreck. Raging, our company officer, Oberleutnant Moser, chases us.
A 37 mm PAK comes down on us. It is inside a house shooting through a window.
‘Aim four o’clock, enemy PAK 125 metres! Explosive shells! Fire!’ It’s too easy. I can hardly be bothered to take aim properly. The turret whirrs. The long barrel of the gun swings round. The PAK fires again. They might as well be using pea-shooters. Muzzle and impact explosions sound almost simultaneously. The house and the PAK disappear – nothing is left of them.
‘Any more for any more?’ questions Porta, moving slowly forward. With a lurch the tank tips into a deep shell-hole. Its nose bores into soft earth.
Porta changes swiftly into back gear, but the tracks only whip around without taking hold. He tries to wobble us free but we are caught. Tiny has a long slash on his face from the corner of an ammunition locker. He has fallen forward together with his shells on top of Heide who is jammed between the wireless and the Funker-MG. He is yelling that his hand has been torn off. Later it turns out that he has broken a finger. Annoying when there
has
to be a casualty that it should only be a broken finger. Not enough to get you out of the wagon for a couple of days.
The Old Man slides over the ammunition basket and gets his arm jammed under the oil-pressure gauge. I have fallen over Porta and get the gear-lever in the crutch. I’m going mad with the pain but it won’t get me a hospital ticket.
It takes Barcelona’s wagon almost fifteen minutes to pull us out. Oberleutnant Moser’s language can be heard far and wide. He is certain we did it on purpose.
‘One more of those and you’re for a court-martial!’ he rages.
‘His mother must have been pissed when she got him,’ Porta mutters contemptuously. ‘He talks as if he’s nearly ready to spew his lights up!’
We take up position close by the burnt-out hospital. Nobody really knows what is happening. The company’s twenty-two tanks are drawn up in one long open row. The guns point expectantly and threateningly forward. We can hear No. 8 Company taking up position on the other side of the river. The rest of the battalion is in readiness down by the sugar factory.
Morning breaks, heavily veiled in fog. That’s the worst of being close to water. Morning and night you’re wrapped in an impenetrable witch’s broth of mist. The heavy weapons are silent. A couple of MGs on the other side of the water are all that can be heard. Nobody has any idea where the infantry is. We don’t even know if they’ve got through the enemy lines. We have a frightful feeling of being all alone in the hugeness of Russia. Slowly the fog lifts and darkness
recedes. Houses and trees take on a shadowy outline and form.
The Panzer infantry moves up in single file, close to the houses, and groups by the tanks. Our guns and MGs break out in a thundering, flaming barrage. The earth shakes and shivers under the bellowing cannonade, long flames shoot from gun-muzzles. An umbrella of tracer covers the terrain.
The regular infantry makes ground in short advances. We shoot just above their heads in a precisely calculated covering fire. It’s no fun moving with shells howling overhead. If they drop short the infantry gets it in the neck and it
can
happen that the soldier behind the gun is an incompetent fool. It doesn’t help the man on the receiving end of a shell to know the gunner behind him will be court-martialled for dropping short.
A long way forward brown uniformed figures are running away from us. They disappear into the fog. Over a hundred tanks hammer shells into the enemy ranks. Disorganized and panic stricken the Russians withdraw to prepared positions.
We are drawn up in ranks as if at firing-practice. Only here the targets are live. Carelessly we leave all hatches open but suddenly a storm of enemy artillery fire breaks over our attacking infantry. They scuttle about digging themselves in. Shells hail from the heavens. Bodies are thrown again and again into the air. Red-hot shell fragments slash terrible wounds. Screams and moans rise from the fox-holes.
A new surprise awaits us. A long line of enemy anti-tank guns move into position. Quickly they range in on us and in the course of a few moments the action develops into a raging duel between our and their guns. The first two PAKs fly to pieces but the others know their job. One of No. 8 Company’s tanks blows up.
Barcelona reports a hit on the turret. His gun is out of commission and he must go back to workshops.