Panzer Soldier

'Gus, you use that magnificent set of lungs to yell as loud as you can that we're Germans and coming through, and not to fire. Everybody got it?'

Teacher acknowledged the order and Gus fretted and bitched about his leftover pig and what to do with it.

The unsuspecting Russians in the bunker raised their fists and saluted. A round from a 75 mm pak whanged off the glass plating and ricocheted into the night. Langer swung the turret over slightly at a range of less than twenty meters and fired. The bunker erupted; the Russians died without ever knowing they had been tricked. On the German side, a lieutenant held his fire, confident that he had plenty of time to take out the lone tank; there was no rush, he had a good crew that had already destroyed over forty Russian tanks; the rings around the barrels of their guns kept an accurate count for them. What's this!? The Russian has stopped dead in the center, the crew is getting out. Why? He called to his infantry support to train their machine guns on the crewmen.

The T-34 exploded, a burned, twisted hulk was all that remained, all in less than thirty seconds. The gunners on the MG-42 sighted only a monstrous bellowing Gus, which halted the pulling of the triggers.

'Don't shoot, you sons of bitches, it's Gus Beiderman and a couple of friends back from the dead.' He led the way, twisting and dodging all the time, keeping up his cursing order not to fire. One of the gunners was tempted anyway; he recognized the voice as belonging to a human gorilla who cheated him out of two months' pay shooting craps.

The Russians finally woke up and got around to sending round after round at the fleeing impostors. Tracers licked their heels and flashed between their legs. Gus yelped as one of them left the inside of his trousers singed, and burned his thigh just inches from the pride and hope of German womanhood.

* * *

From August on, they fought with one unit, then another, as the Russian advances continued, more slowly than in the spring, but still advancing a few more yards or kilometers every day as the supply lines of the Soviet forces built up their reserves for the push into Germany itself. The Russians held back their armies when the Polish Home Army revolted against the Nazis. Because the Poles were not Communists, Stalin held back his forces until the SS could eliminate them in fierce house-to-house battles that wiped out all effective non-Communist resistance that his forces might encounter.

By the end of August, Langer and his men were in East Prussia facing again their old nemesis from the great battles at Kursk and Kharkov. Here in East Prussia the German forces resisted with fanatical determination, but it was of no avail. There were too few men and weapons were left spread out over a front stretching 1,600 kilometers. General Busch's Army Group Center, which Langer had been attached to at Vilnyus, had been decimated. Twenty-five divisions had been trapped; only eight escaped. Most of the captured Germans were simply mowed down. They were the thousands of bodies they had passed on the tracks leading to Kaunas. The Russians claimed 158,000 captured and nearly 400,000 dead. By the time the leaves began to turn. Army Group North was trapped with its back to the Baltic. The Russians were content to leave them where they were tying up the German armies there, with minimal forces keeping them from breaking up to join Army Group Center to the south. They didn't know the situation or they would have attempted to break out. Anyway, Hitler had ordered them to remain there, tying up men that could have been used at the undermanned center.

By the end of October they were still holding the front on the borders of East Prussia. News from the west was scanty and filled with phrases from the minister of propaganda, such as fanatical promises of secret weapons to be unleashed on the allies.

Gus farted at this news. 'Secret weapons, my ass; they can't even produce the old ones. I ain't seen a German fighter in the air for weeks. What the hell happened to them all?'

Teacher merely shook his head, 'It's all just about over, I don't know why they don't just finish us off now, what the hell do we have left to fight with?'

Langer lit a smoke from a pack of Russian cigarets that he had taken off a body; they tasted dry and acrid in his mouth. 'They aren't going to finish us off for a while, not with winter coming on and before that the rains slowing things down a bit before their supply lines can catch up to them. I'd guess it would be spring before the big push comes; they have time on their side. Step by step they push us back and shorten the lines a little. They're finally forcing us to do what should have been done years ago and concentrate our forces where we could get the most strength from them, not stretch them out all over the whole of Russia.' Exhaling, he smelled the air. 'No, it will go on a while longer.'

The earth shook under them as a salvage of heavy Russian artillery ranged about them; the big guns were being brought up. The more familiar sounds of the 76 mm was superseded by the heavier crump of guns up to 210 mm firing a shell that weighed 297 pounds. One of these crater makers hit less than forty feet away, blowing Gus clear out of his foxhole, landing him fifteen feet away, ears ringing and deaf. Langer raced out, grabbed him and dragged him back into a hole. For the next week Gus said he heard the bells of the cathedrals in Cologne, playing the 'Horst Wessel Lied.'

Gus finally disappeared in the middle of October while out scrounging for food; he just walked off to the rear of a village he was visiting between Suwalki and Johannesburg. He had heard that there was a supply depot there holding rations which they had received no orders to distribute. The Russians had picked that time to blast the village from the face of the earth with a barrage from their big guns, combined with an air strike of twin-engine bombers. The last Langer had seen of him was his waddling walk; he had picked up a new style of walking to compensate for the loss of his toes. It made him change the pressure of his step and gave him a gait that looked as if he was about to lose his balance and fall over on his already pushed-in face.

Langer and Teacher searched the rubble of the village and found only the dead. Supplies not destroyed were spread out over three miles and already the scavengers, soldiers and civilians, were fighting over tins of burned food. Of Gus, they assumed that he had finally gone to meet the great quartermaster in the sky, where the clouds rained vodka and the women were always young and pretty. The two made their way alone, stopping to stay awhile with one group, then another, until they were rounded up by some field police in Allenstein along with others and formed into a new group and assigned orders to return to the front. They would have to make their way on foot, there was no transportation available, but from this day on, anyone without written orders would be shot or hung on sight. They shrugged; what difference did it make, now or later? At least it gave them something to do, rather than just wait.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

From the occupied and allied countries they came in the thousands; men, women and children. Transport that should have been used for the Wehrmacht was assigned to the Deathshead Einsatzgruppen. Instead of men and munitions, human cargo. Langer and Teacher moved through the yards. Nausea filled them, their mouths tasting the bitter taste of vomit, barely held back. Truncheons were in widespread use as were pistols. The Germans were retreating, but they were making sure that they took with them all the human misery that they could. The final solution must be carried out.