Winter Warriors

last on board, and he looked quickly around. “How many?”

“We have lost eight dead, and have four wounded.” The voice of the Sergeant was heavy. Twelve was a heavy toll for a small unit. Then Knyaz looked at the train he was on, saw the damage and the bodies scattered in the wreckage. The men on this train had paid a much heavier price than his little unit.

Mechanized Column, 71st Infantry Division, Kola Peninsula

Asbach looked at the trains pulling away. That was impossible. That shouldn’t have happened. One just can’t do that with trains. He stopped an orderly who was collecting casualties. Once the trains had escaped, the jabos had left. “How is Captain Lang?”

The orderly chuckled. “The Captain is still with us, Sir. A bullet in the shoulder and one through his ear but still alive. He refuses to be put on sick call Sir. That’s why the men call him Captain Still Sir. No matter what the enemy do to him, he still turns up for duty.”

“Very good. Give the Captain my commendations and ask him to come to me immediately. We must reassemble the unit and get after those guns.”

Asbach stared at the cloud of smoke that marked the position of the escaping guns. If he could get moving and kept up the chase, he would have one more chance to intercept them.

27th Canadian Armoured Regiment, Kola Peninsula

“Right boys, this is the last stretch. We’re hitting the outer edge of the Finnish forces that have got our infantry bottled up. We break through here and we’ve punched through to the hedgehog. They’re Finns ahead of us; not Germans. So we can expect a lower standard of equipment. They’re hard bastards though; they’ll fight. And remember what they did to the RCAMC detachment back at Division. There’s payback due for that.” A stir of agreement ran around the tank crews and infantry gathered for the briefing.

Captain Michael Brody looked at the assembled team. His squadron of Sheridan tanks had been reinforced with a troop of armored infantry carried in Kangaroos, old Ram tanks that had been converted to armored infantry carriers. There were rumors that the Yanks were producing a new armored carrier, one that was completely enclosed and bullet proof. If it was, that would make a change from their existing half-tracks. Until that rumor became reality, if it ever did of course, the Kangaroo was the best infantry carrier on the battlefield. Well, the least vulnerable anyway.

“The word is, take it easy. There’s no hurry over this. Our hedgehogs are in no danger. The Finns have been trying to break into them for days now and had no luck. Time isn’t long enough for supply to be a problem so we don’t have to crash through. When we contact the enemy, open fire; pin them down and call for artillery. We’ve got lots of it and even more airpower. The Yanks are over on the other front so we don’t have them to worry about. It’s just us and the Russians overhead.” An exaggerated sigh of relief went around the meeting; the American fighter- bomber pilots were notorious for hitting friendly targets. “Right, so everybody mount up. The ground’s hard, we’re not stuck on the roads. First troop, left flank, second troop on the road, third troop out to the right flank. Line abreast. Infantry, you follow on behind. Enemy infantry we’ll take care of, if we run into Pak guns, you take over and handle them while we cover you with HE.”

“Any word on the Paks, Sir?”

“Word is, since its Finns, 50mms.” A murmur of discontent at that. Although the 50mm was technically obsolete, at the ranges the Finns fired them it didn’t make much difference. The 50 was much smaller and easier to hide than the 75s and 88s the Germans used. Usually the first time somebody saw them was when a tank was knocked out. It was a 50 that had brewed up the tank used by the previous commander of A squadron and put Brody in command today.

The relative warmth of the day before had softened the mass of snow that had fallen during the storm and caused it to compact. The cold of the night that had followed froze that compacted mass hard and turned a soft field that would bog tanks down into what amounted to near-perfect tank ground. Brady’s command had three troops of tanks. Technically, he should have had a total of fourteen M27s; but his squadron, like everybody else’s was under strength. Including his own vehicle, he had eleven operational tanks, spread out into a rough line abreast. There were patches of forest ahead, ones that would grow larger and closer together as the site of the besieged Canadian hedgehog got closer. The plan was to plow through the defenses before the Finns could react, force them out of their positions and back on to that hedgehog. It was a classic hammer and anvil approach; Brody’s tanks the hammer and the Canadian infantry in the hedgehog the anvil.

“Tank destroyer, in the woods, one o’clock.” Brody swung his binoculars and stared hard. Lost in the trees, almost, was the sleek shape of a Hetzer. Not one of the more modern German tank destroyers, some of them were real swine with long 88s and thick armor. The Hetzer had the same 75mm as the Panzer IV and was built on the old Panzer 38t chassis. The Germans had passed most of them along to their allies. The Hetzer was cheap, easy to build and maintain. It was also a lot less capable than the German tank destroyers. Allegedly one of the reasons why the Germans had given it to their allies was to make sure that, if said allies decided to change sides, they would be outgunned enough to make sure they did not survive the attempt. Brody reflected that trust was not a dominant feature of the German make-up.

“Load AP.”

“Up.”

“Shoot!”

Five M27s fired almost simultaneously. Their 90mm shots raising fountains of dirt around the concealed Hetzer. A black, oily cloud rose from its position. The sight appeared to have woken the Finns up, or perhaps they had been waiting for the M27s to get into closer range? Three more Hetzers broke cover. They maneuvered to try and get lined up for shots at the fast-moving M27s. That was a problem with the little tank destroyers. They were cramped inside and their guns had very limited traverse. Tracking the Sheridans meant they had to spin the whole vehicle on the suspension in order to get out their shots.

The Finns had obviously been expecting the Canadians to stick to the road. They’d set their tank destroyers up to cover that arc. The wide, spread out Canadian line had thrown that plan to the winds. To make matters worse, most of the Canadian tanks were to the right of the position occupied by the Hetzers and the Hetzer had virtually no right traverse. The time taken for them to spin their vehicles around and aim was just that decisive few seconds too long. Four more of Brody’s tanks concentrated their fire on to the nearest tank destroyer, sending more fountains of frozen snow up around it. They were rewarded by another boiling cloud of orange-shot black smoke. Brody saw one of his tanks lurch to a halt. One of the two surviving tank destroyers had scored and put at least one of the M27s out of the battle. Two of Brodys tanks took a Hetzer each and demolished it with 90mm rounds. That was another problem with the Hetzer, it’s cramped interior made loading painfully slow. In this case, fatally slow.

“Watch out for Paks. Those Hetzers won’t be on their own.” Brody sent the word out while scanning the tree line for the flashes that would reveal the position of the Finnish Pak guns. They were there. He knew it, he could sense them; he could feel the gunner’s eyes on him. “Driver, hard left, now!” His tank swerved and there was the ripping noise of an anti-tank shot missing his vehicle by a few feet. “Load HE”

“Up.”

“Two’clock, by those three big pines, shoot.”

The 90mm guns of his third troop crashed, flinging their shells in the general direction of the Finnish position. More fountains of dirt, the anti-tank gun apparently silenced. Brody knew better than to believe that. “Diamond, this is Coronet. We’ve found the enemy defense line, map reference,” he fumbled with his map and read out the numbers. “Anti-tank guns and tank destroyers.”

“Coronet, on its way.” That was his forward artillery observer. He would take over the shoot now, walking the shells from whatever guns he had been allocated on to the Finnish position. Brody heard the express-train roar overhead and instinctively ducked into his turret. By the time he looked up again, the second salvo had struck home. 25 pounders he guessed. The Yanks preferred their bigger 105s but the 25 pounder could fire eight rounds to the 105s six and in this sort of work it was the number of bangs that mattered, not their size.

“Coronet, hold position, there’s some Sturmoviks coming in as well.” Now that was an interesting surprise. I didn’t think I was that important. He looked overhead, searching for the aircraft while the shells from the artillery battery supporting him continued to pulverize the tree line. Keyed by a flash as the sun reflected off a canopy, he saw them, a dozen aircraft already forming into a circle over the target area. Like buzzards waiting for something to die.