Authors: Sven Hassel
'Nuts!' hissed Little John, in my ear. 'Bleeding nuts out of the nut house, that's what they are!'
He was quite right: an asylum near Caen had been evacuated and the arrival of our long column of tanks had created panic in their already confused midst. They darted about in all directions, some clapping their hands and grinning, others raving and howling like wild beasts. Some just stood vacant in the middle of the road, heads rolling limply and arms hanging. One poor idiot hurled himself under a tank and was crushed. The nuns called out despairingly and threw their arms into the air, but the demented horde seemed bent on self-destruction. Suddenly, out of the gloom, a man wearing the white coat of a doctor advanced threateningly upon us.
'Stop!' cried the Old Man, foreseeing disaster. 'Stop, for the love of God!'
The radio was still turned on. Three battalions heard the order, and slowly the entire column of tanks came to a halt. Almost at once Major Mercedes' car came tearing along by the side of us, going full speed ahead and sending showers of nuns and lunatics scattering into the ditch. His voice came furiously over the radio.
'What cretin gave the order to stop? Whoever he is, he can expect to be court-martialled for sheer bloody stupidity! Get started again, we stop for no one!'
With groans of agony the heavy tanks lumbered once more into movement. One of them ploughed straight through the group of lunatics. The driver obviously panicked and lost control, and the vehicle shuddered to a halt in the middle of the road, once again bringing us to a standstill. Bodies lay crushed on either side of the offending tank. One old nun advanced furiously upon it and began beating against the metal with clenched fists.
'Murderers! You're nothing but murderers, the lot of you!'
No one took any notice of her. The Major's car drew up with an ill-tempered screeching of brakes, and the Major's head appeared through the window, scowling and hideous in its anger. The black patch gleamed nastily over his right eye.
'That idiot's not fit to drive a toy car,
never
mind a bloody tank! Get someone else on the job, for Christ's sake! And as for you'--he glared at a luckless lieutenant nervously inching himself up through the hatch--'we'll see about you later! Of all the crassly stupid things to do----' Words happily failed him. He turned back to the rest of us and waved the column onwards. 'Get going and keep going! I don't care if you see Christ himself walking down the road, we stop for no one--and I mean no one! Is that quite clear? Anyone gets in the way, he's had it. Teach him not to be so damn careless in future.'
At that moment, before the Major had had time to move off again, a group of vehicles marked with red crosses attempted unsuccessfully to overtake us. In spite of their demands for passage we stood firm and let them sink themselves in the ditch. The Tigers stopped for no one; the Tigers gave way to no one.
An infantry lieutenant came storming past us on foot, followed by an officer for the Feldgendarmerie, his half-moon badge glinting evilly through the gloom. He had snatched out his revolver and seemed disinclined for any civil form of conversation. I heard him shouting as he walked.
'This is sabotage! Someone's going to suffer for this! Who's the fool commanding this load of morons?'
He was very sure of himself. The members of the Feldgendarmerie were, in general, scared of neither man nor the devil; nor even, for that matter, of the Fuhrer himself. An ordinary major was mincemeat to them. Happily, Major Mercedes was no ordinary major. He didn't give too much for man or the devil himself, and I don't believe the Fuhrer roused any particular feelings of reverence in him.
'Tigers!' His voice bellowed along the length of the column, rolling and echoing from one side of the read to the other. 'I gave you an order: get started! We stop for no one! And as for you, sir'--he turned towards the two men, pushing the Feldgendarme out of the way and addressing himself to the Lieutenant--'I advise you to get your miserable little pushchairs well off the road if you don't want them crushed. I should also,' he added, as an afterthought, 'proceed back via way of the ditch. I think you'll find it safer.'
The Tigers rolled onwards. We managed to get some way before we ran into yet another column of men, almost as bizarre to behold as the group of lunatics from Caen. For a start, although the column wore the uniform of the German Army, it was comprised of half the peoples of Europe. There were Russians, Ukrainians and Cossacks; Bosnians of the Muslim division, Bavarians, Alsatians; Hungarians, Poles, Italians. And not only that, the entire column had obviously but one thought in its multiracial mind, and that was flight. They came pell-mell up the road towards us, a strange mixture of panic and determination on that strange mixture of faces. We raised a great cheer as the vanguard of the fleeing hordes flashed past us.
'The German Army!' shouted Porta, exultantly. 'God bless 'em! If only Adolf were here to see it...' He pointed at a fast-moving knot of men from a parachute regiment. 'If only Hermann were here to see it!'
'Can it be,' said Barcelona, very solemnly, 'that we are losing the war?'
'Never!' shouted Porta.
Our laughter echoed wildly inside the tank.
'Hallo!' said the Old Man, peering out again. 'What's this lot coming up?'
It was a cavalry unit. They approached at a furious gallop, slashing with sabres at the deserting hordes, spreading out in a wide fan shape to engulf the whole mass. We recognized them by their red collars as General Vlassov's Cossacks, specialists in this kind of work. They rode like demons, standing upright in the stirrups, with the foam flecking the nostrils of their sturdy little horses. Harsh commands were shouted in Russian; sabres flashed and glinted. In a matter of minutes they had rounded up the whole column and were encircling them, yelling like savages all the while. Some of them dismounted and waded into the midst of the heaving mass of bodies, slashing and cutting at random until we could see the rivers of blood from some distance away. No one put up any fight.
[*Pages 82, 83 missing*]
a stream of Russian that was too fast for me to catch, but in a flash Little John was out of the tank and on top of the man. He picked him up in one immense paw and shook him vigorously to and fro.
'Filthy Russian peasant, you'd better change your tone pretty quick or I'll thrash you half-way to Dalstroj myself, and I'll use your own nagajka to do it, as well!'
Another stream of Russian. Obviously abuse, almost certainly obscene. There's no language quite like Russian when it comes to swearing. It would be worth taking it up for that alone.
Little John just jeered and threw the man contemptuously away from him. The Cossack bolted for his horse, leaped into the saddle and shot off after his companions, who had prudently disappeared at the first mention of the word Dalstroj. He turned to raise his sabre in a menacing gesture and to hurl a few more obscenities at us, but it had small effect on Little John.
'Get knotted, filthy peasants!' he roared.
The regiment of Cossacks, driving the would-be deserters before them, faded slowly into the distance, and Lt. Lowe came up to our tank with disapproval written all over him.
'Obergfreiter Porta, I will not allow men under my command to make fools of our allies... particularly when they're voluntary allies! One of their damned officers has just been around and complained to me about you.'
'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Porta, very earnestly. 'The man wanted his fortune told, so I told it, that's all.'
'Oh? I didn't know you were gifted with clairvoyance? What did you tell him?'
'Only the truth,' said Porta, hurt.
'Which is?'
'I told him he'd be ending his days back home with Uncle Joe, stewing out at Dalstroj. Any fool could foretell that.'
'I wish to God you'd keep your big clanging mouth shut just once in a while!' snapped Lowe, irritably. 'You'll end up in Dalstroj yourself one of these days, if you're not very careful!'
'Ah. Very likely,' agreed Porta, with a sigh.
The Lieutenant stalked away, evidently displeased. The column moved forward again, accompanied by the screeching of owls somewhere in the woods near by. The night gradually wore itself out and began mistily to merge into day. Inside the tank, we prepared a sort of breakfast, brewing ersatz coffee over a spirit stove, at grave risk of setting ourselves alight and blowing the Tiger sky-high. We carved hunks of bread off the tough rubbery block that passed for a loaf in the Army, and to make it more palatable than usual we smeared it inches thick with some beetroot jam that Porta had casually picked up at the same time as the Schnapps.
Day at last arrived, grey and unpleasant. The column came to a temporary halt. A regiment of grenadiers arrived from somewhere, all of them cursing roundly and in thoroughly bad humour, and a battery of Flak was set up. Porta made matters worse than was strictly necessary by taunting them that they couldn't even hit a formation of bombers five metres away at ground level. Fortunately, before a fight could break out, we were once more ordered on our way.
The heavy Tiger ground protestingly forward, nose to tail with her immediate neighbours. A couple of enemy planes appeared overhead, scattered a few bombs at random throughout the length of the column and flew off again, completely unharmed despite the ferocious efforts coming from the Flak batteries.
At last we reached the positions we had been making for. The signal for attack was given. The Tigers moved into formation, killers once again. Beneath every stone, behind every bush, every tree, every fold in the landscape death was lying in wait for the unwary in the shape of tanks and bazookas, cannons, magnetic mines and flamethrowers. Through the periscope we were able to make out the enemy positions. For infantrymen, a full-scale attack by heavy tanks is an atrocity pure and simple, and the enemy observers had had their eye on us for a long while. Grenades were already raining down on us, but we were plunging forward at the rate of forty kilometres an hour and nothing could stop the attack.
'Fasten down the hatches,' ordered the Old Man. 'Turret at two o'clock. Range seven hundred. Pak heavily camouflaged.'
Lines and squares danced in a blurred vision before me. The Old Man tapped me on the shoulder.
'Got it?'
'Not yet. All I can see are a few bushes and a heap of ruins.'
'That's where it is,' said the Old Man, grimly.
A sudden flash from a cannon revealed the camouflaged anti-tank guns. A grenade missed us by a matter of centimetres. I set hastily to work again and the figures leapt and jerked: 600, 650... the points met, the lens cleared.
'Get a move on,' said the Old Man, nervously.
I fired. The pressure of air hit us like a clenched fist, the red-hot cartridge case fell to the floor. A sound of clicking and the cannon was ready again. But not needed for the moment: we could see from the debris rising into the air that we had achieved our target. The anti-tank gun had been put out of action and whatever might have been left of it was very soon crushed to pulp beneath our tracks.
'Turret at two o'clock.! Range five hundred. Fire straight ahead.'
The motor purred, the turret swivelled, and I saw the target at once: Churchills, which were always easy to identify with their long bodies and low turrets. There were six of them, standing stationary and in line.
We drew to a halt. Only the inexperienced fire while moving, but yet an element of speed was essential if we were to take full advantage of the situation. A stationary tank is, so to speak, a sitting duck. Little John threw open one of the side panels to watch the fun and instantly had the Old Man roaring down his neck.
'Shut that flaming thing up!'
'No need to panic,' said Little John, equably. 'And just please to remember that I am an Obergefreiter and the backbone of the German Army.'
The Old Man swore and turned towards me as being more malleable.
'Pick off the last of the buggers to begin with, then try the leader. O.K.?... Fire!'
The long cannon leapt in my hands. A spout of flame
shot
out and I had time to see the Churchill rocking beneath the blow before the turret swung round and I fired on the leader of the column. This time I had the satisfaction of watching the target disintegrate completely and go skywards in a whirling mass of metal.
'Change position!'
Porta backed down into a fold in the ground and I followed the remaining four Churchills in the periscope. I chose one of them, got it in my sights and fired. This time
I
was not so lucky, the shot glanced off the turret. They must have had a nasty few seconds inside her, but already they were opening up the hatches and jumping out. Heide instantly let rip with the machine-gun and we received an answering salvo of grenades. Fortunately they fell short, but it was enough to send Little John reeling back inside the tank with sweat pouring off his brow.
I concentrated the next of the Churchills in the periscope. The long grenade flew swift and sure to its target, yet the tank remained in place. For a moment I was puzzled, and then we saw a thin white spiral of smoke rising from the stricken vehicle. Seconds later there was an explosion. Flames burst their way out, leaping voraciously upwards in search of anything else that might be combustible.
'Change position! Over by the ruins. Turret at two o'clock. Range 300...Fire!'
The remaining two Churchills were easy prey. Little John insisted on jumping out of the tank there and then and painting the six rings of victory on the turret. The Old Man's wrath was dreadful to behold, but Little John had no idea of discipline and threats were a mere waste of breath. He and Porta must have held the joint record for disorderly conduct.
Behind us, the field artillery were opening up and we were beneath a protective umbrella of fire. The enemy were mopping up the whole of Beach 109 and the Canadian infantry were fighting like fanatics with anything they could lay hands on. One sergeant, for want of anything more lethal, even tried hurling rocks at us.