on the engines and added a little to maximum speed. Now, the second crewman served only as a navigator and radio operator. He was vital in that role. He could speak with the forward air controllers on the ground and leave the pilot to worry about avoiding German flak.
“Hitting an armored column moving up from the south. Its threatening one of the Navy’s railway gun batteries so we’re to slow it down a bit. Steer course 178, hold altitude, 2000 feet. We’re about 15 minutes out.”
“Armored. Panzers?”
“Panzer-grenadiers. According to the recon patrols, it’s a mixed column. Mostly mechanized infantry with an armored car unit and a self-propelled artillery battery.”
Marosy sucked his teeth. Panzer-grenadiers meant flak, a lot of it. Each half track had a 20mm gun and there would certainly be at least one quad twenty or twin thirty. And that wasn’t the worst of it. If there were infantry, there would be spirals. They’d only appeared in the last few months and weren’t that effective but they were yet another thing to worry about. He scanned downwards, trying to pick out the vehicles on the ground against the glaring snowfields. There were theoretical armchair “experts” who decried camouflage, who would point at the vehicles on display or in pictures and sneer that the elaborate paint schemes didn’t fool him. Well, it was interesting that people like that were very keen to fire off their opinions but very reluctant to get involved in any other form of firing.
Up here, trying to spot white vehicles against a white background, camouflage was very effective. It cost aircraft. It meant that the Grizzlies had to stay higher so they could search more effectively, then dive down for their attacks. That gave the Germans a few seconds of warning, time for them to start to disperse and get their guns lined up.
His eyes continued scanning downwards, looking for the telltale signs of a vehicle convoy moving. It could be anything; tracks on the snow although thickness and freshness made that unlikely. The vehicles would be moving on the roads. He wouldn’t see the roads themselves, they were white as well, but he might see the shadows. The sharp, clear sun was a friend as well as an enemy. It cast shadows of banks and vehicles where the object itself wasn’t so easily seen.
In fact, it was the sun that helped him, although it worked in a different way that he had expected. His eyes caught a flash on the ground, a reflection off a windshield perhaps, or a pair of binoculars. Whatever it was, it caught his attention and focused him on a section of road underneath. That’s when he saw the vehicles and knew that they had seen him. Given the snarl of four R-3350s and the altitude he was flying at, they would have had to be blind, deaf and stupid to have missed the pair of Grizzlies. They were dispersing as much as the ground and the snow let them. He knew for certain that they were getting their flak ready.
“Got you,
Marosy put
Marosy saw one of the half-tracks giving a dense stream of tracers. It had to be a quad-twenty vehicle; probably the biggest threat. He lined up and squeezed the firing trigger. The aircraft lurched as the 75mm in its nose fired. Through the muzzle flash he saw his first round had landed short. His second was a little to the left but the third turn the half-track into a red and orange fireball. Then, he saw something else, streaks of gray smoke leaving the ground and heading for him. Spirals.
“Disperse! Get those vehicles separated. Gunners open fire when you have the target.” Colonel Asbach yelled the orders out. They had little time to prepare for the attack that had suddenly developed. They’d seen the Grizzlies of course, and heard their engines. For a while it seemed that the Ami jabos had missed them and would head off south. Then, the aircraft had turned slightly towards them, before diving away to the west. Everybody in the column knew that they had been spotted. That meant the column would soon be fighting for its life.
At the rear of the column the six self-propelled 150mm howitzers were frantically backing up, trying to get clear of the rest of the column. Their trucks were doing likewise and doing a better job of it. The English-built AECs were renowned for their ability to cope with bad conditions. When they worked at all. The British truck workers had a habit of building subtle defects into their vehicles; an axle over-tempered perhaps so it fractured under stress, or a towing bar whose mounting welds would fail when an extra load was put on it. More importantly, they weren’t overloaded. The self-propelled guns were. Like most German self-propelled artillery, the guns used captured enemy tank chassis. In this case, some British cruiser tank captured back in 1942. The Covenanter or something similar. It didn’t matter, what did was that the chassis was overloaded and clumsy. Still, the battery was better than towed guns.
The two anti-aircraft half tracks attached to the artillery battery had already swerved to a halt. The crews on the quadruple 20mm guns elevated their weapons and scanned for the approaching jabos. Ahead of them, the half- track belonging to the anti tank squad of one of the mechanized infantry platoons had also stopped. Strange figures were emerging from it, looking like running tents with a stove pipe sticking out. The stove pipes were the Panzerschreck rocket launchers, the running tents were the men who were going to be firing them. To his astonishment, Sergeant Heim saw Captain Lang jump from his kubelwagen and run over to that half-track.
“Sergeant! A cape, a Panzerschreck launcher and a Fliegerschreck rocket. Now!” Lang’s voice was urgent, there was little time. In the back of the vehicle, the anti-tank unit Sergeant looked doubtful. Captain Still’s reputation had spread beyond the artillery unit. Lang’s hand dropped to his pistol. “Now, Sergeant.”
That did it. The Sergeant passed out the equipment demanded. Lang hurriedly checked the cape. The white side was out. It was shaped like a cone, with two tubes for his arms. He slipped into it, then took the Fliegerschreck rocket and checked the fuse. It was the standard Panzerschreck rocket but fitted with a powerful booster and had a time fuse on the end. Lang dialed it down to minimum, then slipped it into the rocket launcher. The Grizzlies had already come over the ridge and were heading for the unit when Lang got into position. He knelt exactly the way the user manual for the Fliegerschreck said, and aimed the clumsy launcher at the lead of the two aircraft.
Lang was already starting to sweat inside the clumsy protective cape. The first Panzerschreck launchers years before had required the users to wear protective capes but their back-blast was nothing compared with that of the Fliegerschreck rocket. The booster needed to give the rocket the speed and range necessary to engage an aircraft would immerse the operator in a ball of fire when the rocket ignited. Without the tent-like cape, survival was not an option.
Through the glass panel in the front of the cape, Lang saw the first Fliegerschreck rockets go out. First, the long streak of the booster, then the wild spiral as the Panzerschreck rocket detached for the final spurt. There was something odd about firing things in stages; it didn’t work very well at all. Lang had heard that the Peenemunde group’s efforts to build two-stage versions of the A-4 had been failures for that reason. They were still trying, still working towards a rocket that could cross the Atlantic and strike at American cities, but the problems were proving intractable. Quietly, one of Lang’s General Staff friends had told him it wasn’t likely that the multi-stage rockets would be anywhere near usable this decade. Looking at the wild gyrations of the Fliegerschrecks, Lang could see
