On the inside of the tank, the young Lieutenant was wholly glad to receive orders to withdraw, and lost no time in passing the instructions to the survivors.
Parker moved away and watched as the remnants of his mobile force worked their way backwards… still engaging… still fighting… face to the enemy.
He nodded in silent praise at the way the three tanks worked as a team. Pulling out his Colt automatic, he ran back to where he had left his two crewmen, but found the position empty.
A quick scan revealed no clue as to their whereabouts, but he had other fish to fry in any case.
The sound of aero engines made him look skyward, and he was rewarded with the sight of the returning aircraft, who immediately renewed their attack on the Soviet positions, including the IS-IIIs who now started to suffer casualties.
Leaping from rubble to rubble, hole to hole, he moved closer to the nearest surviving disabled Super Pershing, intent on organising the resistance or salvaging what he could of the unit, whichever needed to be done.
Gauging the distance to the rear of the disabled tank, Parker made the final sprint and flopped onto the ground in its shadow.
Underneath him, a Type 43 Riegel bar mine sensed the pressure. Normally it would not have been enough to detonate, Parker’s weight being less than the designated one hundred and eighty kilos down force.
However, that did not matter to the unstable mine.
Four kilos of TNT exploded in an instant, spreading parts of Parker over the rear of the Pershing, and numerous points beyond.
Yatzhin, dismounted from his tank, watched in a rage as his second and third companies withdrew in disarray.
His rage was not aimed at his poor soldiers, who had given all they could, but at the Allied airmen, who once again had saved the day for his enemy.
He swivelled his binoculars and exercised a studied calm as he noted the smoking ruins of all but four of the IS-IIIs, most destroyed by the enemy aircraft that continued to circle the battlefield.
Just to confirm his recollections of the swift but merciless air attack, he sought out the blackened and smoking hole on the side of Height 424, the site of the sole success against the fliers who had plagued his command.
A single Thunderbolt had succumbed to his AA defence, and had driven straight into the hillside.
Yatzhin dropped the binoculars to his chest and took a deep breath to clear his mind.
His orders had been discharged, and the enemy assaults on the two key heights had been repulsed, the Cossacks on Height 424 having recaptured the high ground when the tanks in the valley had started to withdraw.
However, he had lost the majority of his command in the process, and a second push by any substantial enemy force would carry them through and beyond his positions in a matter of a few moments.
The US artillery started up again, harrying his withdrawing tanks, as well as bringing discomfort to the cavalrymen repairing their positions on Height 424.
He envied the matériel available to his enemy, his own supply situation tenuous at best, at worst a nothingness that forecast solely disaster for the Red Army.
Yatzhin snorted, totally without humour, assuring himself that the only reason he would have a full load of ammunition on his tank was that he now had less tanks to supply.
“Blyad.”
“Comrade Mayor?”
“Nothing, Comrade Praporshchik, nothing.”
“Right, pack up and prepare to move back. I’m returning to my tank.”
Neither he, nor the Praporshchik, or the rest of the headquarters group heard it.
None the less, it was very real.
The shell had been fired by an M43 Self-propelled gun, sporting a heavy M115 8” howitzer.
It was the first shot the unit had fired that day, and the most effective.
The two hundred pound shell struck directly on Yatzhin’s command tank, sending vicious pieces of sharp metal in all directions.
The Major felt as if he had been kicked in the belly, but his attention was mainly drawn to the Praporshchik, who simply fell into four large loosely connected pieces, as shards of metal scythed through his body.
The screams and wails of those hit by life-taking metal filled his senses.
A wall of flame washed over him as his smashed tank and crew were immolated before his eyes.
The shock wave lifted him up and sent him flying backwards, smashing through something that could only have been another human being, before he came to rest in a bush thirty yards from where he had been standing.
Still he felt no pain, but he was fascinated by the silver-grey entrails that spread from his riven stomach back down the path he had just been thrown.
His belly had been sliced open, as neat and precise as if done by a top surgeon, allowing his stomach and organs to come tumbling out and drag in the earth.
His back started to protest first, a number of teeth and parts of a jawbone buried in his kidney area, pieces of the young radio operator he had smashed into during his rearward flight.
And then, like a tidal wave, the pain came and robbed him of his senses.
Yatzhin screamed…
…and screamed…
…and screamed…
He was still screaming when the medical detail recovered his intestines, washed them clean with water, before bagging them as best they could, and carrying the hideously wounded officer away.
What happened at Fulda, and around Lehnerz and Niesig, was a microcosm of the American front.
A battle that produced nothing but dead and maimed men, smashed equipment, expenditure of supplies, and little to show for it militarily, save for a few feet of ground, one way or the other.
In just over an hour of combat, forty-eight tanks, six anti-tank guns, twenty-nine assorted vehicles, and one aircraft had been destroyed or put out of action.
Combined casualties amounted to six hundred and seventy dead, with a similar number wounded.
The Soviet plan to inflict casualties upon the Americans was working, as the US generals knew only too well.
The Red Army’s own casualties were horrendous, but the USSR did not suffer from the diseases of freedom and democracy, as Stalin was want to put it.
Despite the losses, Fulda was insignificant in the greater run of things, or so it seemed, because one particular loss proved to be the catalyst for significant events in the American capital.
Some weeks later, well after the battle, the family of Sergeant Art Dewey received the confirmation that he had been killed in action, his remains, and those of Priest, eventually found amongst the smashed rubble of Lehnerz.
They were one of many families that received such notifications in the month of August 1946.
The difference was that Arthur Lawrence Dewey was the son of Thomas Edmund Dewey, Governor of New York and the defeated Republican presidential candidate in the ’44 election, a man who was an established anti-intervention politician, a man now in mourning, and a man supplied with the full facts of the pointless nature of his son’s death in front of Height 424 near Fulda.
A man who developed a thirst for retribution, and a specific idea on how it could be achieved.
And so it was that a relatively unimportant battle became a pivotal point in the European War or, more accurately, the political war at home.
Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Djorov listened impassively to the instructions of his air controller.
Returned from his test pilot role to command of 2nd Guards Special Fighter Regiment, he now led the most capable fighter unit in the Red Air Force and, if things went as was hoped, he would shortly have an opportunity to lead them into combat for the first time in their new guise.