The second man chose the thigh for his next thrust, glancing off the femur, and bringing louder screams from the American.
The Soviet rifleman laughed, for all of two seconds, until his comrade’s head exploded, destroyed by a point blank shot from Hardegen’s Colt.
The Mosin exploded in his hands, the finger automatically triggering off a round. Hardegen’s femur did not survive the passage of the 7.62mm round.
Hardegen’s next three shots blew out his spine, and the man was thrown across the space and into the snow.
The destruction of the Sherman had started a response, and the additional sounds of screams and firing had ensured that the entire Soviet force stood to.
Through the extremes of pain, Hardegen heard running feet and prepared the pistol, although he couldn’t seem to manage to hold it up now.
His eyes were growing misty.
A shape came into view, silhouetted against the growing fire in ‘Bismarck’, followed by another, then more.
The weight of the Colt was too much and it stubbornly refused to rise from the snow.
His vision cleared, albeit for just a moment, allowing him to watch his tank explode internally.
Hardegen smiled.
The Soviet officer brought up his PPD and emptied it into Hardegen at point-blank range.
Bailianov replaced the magazine and spat on the riddled corpse, directing his men to retrieve the bodies of their comrades.
The snow redoubled its efforts and fell thickly to ground, covering the bodies of two thousand men and women who had fallen in a single battle.
Tomorrow would be another day.
Chapter 121 – DER SCHWALBE
All skill is in vain when an angel pees in the touchhole of your musket.
Djorov had recovered his sense of humour, his November near-miss slowly becoming more distant in the memory.
The problems with the Yakolev-9 meant that he asked for, and was given, permission to rejoin his command, whilst the engineers fixed the problems with the revolutionary plane.
The 2nd Guards Fighter Regiment was Djorov’s pride and joy. Its pilots were veterans, all skilled in the arts and intricacies of flying combat aircraft and, most importantly, staying alive.
2nd Guards had been spared from the blood-letting over the Baltic, set aside as a reserve by Red Air force Command, just in case of some allied lunge at the Motherland.
2nd Guards was also very different to other Soviet fighter units, in that it flew all conceivable types of aircraft, testing, in battle conditions, the limitations and capabilities of each.
Which brought Djorov and his men to the task in hand, conducting take-offs and landings from reduced length runways.
Higher authority had decided that the results of using a full length runway, painted to set out a shorter length, would be unreliable, as there would be less pressure on the pilot to get the landing right.
As is the way of such things across the armies of the world, Djorov and his men were not consulted on this decision, just given their orders, which permitted them to curse the leadership for their stupidity. However, secretly, some thought that it might be a reasonable point.
Today, a flight of aircraft from the 2nd Guards was practicing on the runway at Baltiysk, having flown the short distance from their home base at Lugovoye, until recently the Luftwaffe airfield of Gutenfeld, set adjacent to Königsberg, some forty kilometres to the east.
The Yaks, LaGGs, and MiGs had all landed safely, although that wasn’t always the case.
The previous day had seen two old campaigners die.
The first, a Hero of the Soviet Union, had crashed on landing when his Focke-Wulf Ta152 lost part of its landing gear.
Half an hour later, another experienced pilot died when he failed to recover from an accidental spin.
It was a hard double blow to a unit that had suffered very little in the new war.
Those pilots that had already landed gathered to watch their commander perform the most difficult task of the first session.
In the control tower, landing clearance was given, and the betting concluded.
“Blyad!”
Djorov knew he had messed it up again and hit the throttles.
The twin Jumo turbojets roared in response to the call for additional power, and the ME 262 sprang back into the sky once more.
In the control tower, a greasy hand swept up the handful of roubles, the winner permitting himself a throaty laugh before he considered the new proposition from the radio operator.
“Deal.”
More roubles were placed out and the tower crew turned back to see where the ex-German fighter was now.
Djorov knew that he needed to clear his mind. Three failures in a row was too much, so he exercised his command decision-making powers and altered the schedule.
“Svetlana, Svetlana, Swallow-One, discontinuing landing cycle… now on performance testing. Will return to landing cycle in two-zero minutes, over.”
‘Svetlana’ responded, eyeing the roubles on the top of his radio cabinet.
“Swallow-One, Svetlana, Received. Out.”
The radio operator eyed the old Sergeant suspiciously.
“Leave it there ‘til he gets back then eh? It’ll keep, boy.”
He nodded, leaning back to stare up into the bright snowless sky, hearing the ME 262, but not seeing it.
With plenty of fuel onboard, Djorov had decided that an altitude test would help relax him before he tried the landing again.
The problem was that the ME 262 needed at least one thousand two hundred metres to land on, whereas he was trying to put the aircraft down on one thousand and a bit.
He had joked that the bit could be all important.
As the Allies knocked out more and more airfields, the Red Air Force had turned to using roads and autobahns, just as the Luftwaffe had done in 1945.
Those pieces of road that were of an appropriate length had also started to receive attention from enemy bombers, so the 2nd was ordered to find procedures to shave take-off and landing distances from all types of aircraft.
As a number of ME 262s had fallen into Soviet hands, it was considered important to get them into combat as soon as possible. Pilots were in training for the task, and Djorov was expected to present his written report on new procedures before the end of December, hence the additional pressure he felt.
For now, that pressure was lifted by the sheer joy of uninhibited high speed flight.
Enjoying the sunlight, not totally believing the reports that most of Europe lay under a blanket of snow and afflicted by record lows, he drove his aircraft upwards, gaining height easily as the big turbojets consumed fuel, further lightening the aircraft.
The ceiling for the ME 262 Schwalbe was supposed to be eleven and a half thousand metres, but issues with the quality of fuel had kept the three birds that 2nd Guards operated to well below eleven thousand.
The latest fuel issue had promised much, the recently discovered ex-Luftwaffe stock instantly set aside purely for the jet fighters.
And so it proved, Djorov’s delight at soaring past eleven thousand growing as the Schwalbe exhibited no signs of slowing.
It was a beautiful day to be a fighter pilot.
On the ground at Karup, the mission had seemed more than reasonable.
Now, literally in the cold light of day, the bomber crew felt less than happy.
Captain Barnes pushed the aircraft as high as he could, but it was probably still within the capabilities of most Soviet aircraft.
Of some comfort was the full squadron of Mustangs that flew beneath the single aircraft, and the two groups that were sweeping ahead.