He wanted to make sure there’d be a next time. If they hung around here much longer, there was liable not to be. And so he retreated. If his superiors didn’t like it … they’d stick around and get killed.
A new Panzer IV. Theo Hossbach almost smiled as he eyed the factory-fresh machine. Inside the fighting compartment, it smelled of leather and paint. They hadn’t swabbed it down with gasoline. That was what they used to mask the odor of rotting flesh, the stench that said the last crew hadn’t made it even if they’d salvaged the panzer.
With Theo’s crew, it was just the opposite. They’d bailed out after a hit from a T-34 knocked a track off their last Panzer IV. As far as the radioman and bow gunner knew, that panzer was a write-off. But none of the five men in black coveralls got so much as a scratch. For a crew that had to abandon ship, so to speak, that was amazing luck.
Theo opened and closed his left hand. One finger there was only a stub: a souvenir of the last time he’d fled a crippled panzer, back in France. He’d got out of the Panzer II all right. Trouble was, they didn’t stop shooting at you after you made your escape. He’d been hit running for cover. It hardly seemed fair.
Adalbert Stoss, the driver, smacked his new mount’s armored flank with rough affection. “Another horse to put through the paces,” he said.
“I thought you’d talk about scoring goals in it,” Sergeant Hermann Witt said. The panzer commander grinned. Theo found himself nodding. Adi Stoss was the best footballer he’d ever seen.
But Adi didn’t rise to the gibe. All he said was, “My main goal is coming out of this mess in one piece.” He ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair. “What else can we hope for?”
A National Socialist Loyalty Officer would have thundered forth bromides about victory and conquest and smashing the Jews in the Kremlin and the hordes of Slavic Untermenschen those Jews led. Nobody in the panzer crew thought that way, though. They’d all seen and been through a lot. Theo knew too well that they weren’t going to be part of a triumphal parade through Red Square. Hell, they’d never made it into Smolensk, much less Moscow. Once you came to grips with that, what could possibly matter more than getting home with two arms and two legs and two eyes and two balls?
Adi, if course, had more things to worry about even than the rest of the panzer men. He had to worry about Soviet panzer cannon the same way they did. But the country whose uniform he wore-and wore well-could be more dangerous to him than the Ivans were.
Theo said nothing about that. His crewmates would have been surprised if he had. He surprised them every time he opened his mouth, because he did it as little as he possibly could. He lived almost all his life inside the bony box bounded by his eyes, his ears, and the back of his head.
He would have said even less than he actually did if the Wehrmacht, in its infinite wisdom, hadn’t made him a radioman. He couldn’t believe that the aptitude tests he took when he got conscripted said he was ideal for the slot. Maybe they’d been short of men for the school and just grabbed the first five file folders that happened to be lying on the table. Or maybe some personnel sergeant back in Breslau owned a truly evil sense of humor.
Years too late to wonder about that now. When the Wehrmacht told you to do this, this was what you did. Oh, you could tell them no. But that was how you found out about what places like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen were like on the inside. Sensible Germans knew such bits of knowledge came at too high a cost.
Sergeant Witt clambered up onto the new panzer’s turret. The panzer commander opened a hatch and slid inside. His voice came from the bowels of the machine: “All the comforts of home!”
“Oh, yeah?” That was Lothar Eckhardt, the gunner. “Where’s the bed? Where’s the broad with the big tits in the bed?”
Witt’s head popped out of the hatch. “Don’t worry about that, Lothar. You’ve got a bigger gun here than you do in the bedroom.” All the panzer crewmen laughed, some more goatishly than others. Theo didn’t count laughter against his starvation ration of speech.
“Right, Sergeant,” Eckhardt said with exaggerated patience. “But I have more fun with the one I’ve got on me. And I don’t need Poske here to help me shoot it off, either.” He nudged the loader, who was standing next to him.
Kurt Poske pushed back. “You’d better not. You’d be some kind of fairy if you did.”
Witt flipped a limp wrist. “Come on, girls,” he said in a lisping falsetto that would have won him a pink triangle in a camp. “Why don’t you see how you like it in here?”
Theo found his spot in the right front of the panzer hull only a little different from the same seat in the last Panzer IV. But no rungs were welded to the inside of the machine to hold his Schmeisser. He stowed the personal-defense weapon between his feet. Sooner or later, somebody in the company repair crew could take care of it for him.
Adi didn’t have a place to hang his machine pistol, either. He couldn’t stash it the way Theo had, not when his feet needed to work the brake and clutch and accelerator. He set it behind Theo’s radio set. “Just for the time being,” he said apologetically. Theo nodded. That didn’t count against his speech ration, either.
“Fire it up, Adi,” Hermann Witt said, and Stoss’ finger stabbed the starter button on the instrument panel in front of him. The motor roared to life at once. That was what a fresh battery would do for you. The engine noise was higher and smoother than it had been in the old machine. This power plant hadn’t been worked to death shoving twenty tonnes of panzer across the rutted, unforgiving Russian landscape.
Yet.
As the panzer rumbled and rattled up toward the platoon’s assembly area, Theo hooked himself back into the regimental radio network. Shifting frequencies, he heard different voices in his earphones. He had to do some talking of his own, to let the owners of those voices know this panzer and its crew were attached to them. Since those words were strictly line-of-duty, he didn’t feel obliged to count them.
They didn’t stay assembled in the area for very long. Half an hour after the Panzer IV joined its mates, they moved out to try to blunt a Russian westward thrust. The Reich didn’t have the bit between its teeth in Russia any more. Now hanging on to some of what it had gained in happier times was as much as it could hope for.
The new panzer clanked past the burnt-out hulk of a German armored car. Fifty meters farther on sat the chassis of a Russian T-34, with the turret blown off and upside-down beside it. Theo did use a word: “Tiger.”
“You bet it was,” Adi agreed. The German heavy tank’s fearsome 88 could devastate a T-34 like that. A Panzer IV’s long-barreled 75 could kill one, but couldn’t smash it that way. And a T-34 could kill a Panzer IV just as readily, while a Tiger’s thick frontal armor laughed at anything the Russian machine threw at it.
And then Witt shouted, “Panzer halt!”
“Halting.” As Adi spoke, he trod hard on the brake.
At Witt’s orders, the turret traversed to somewhere between two and three o’clock. The gun rose slightly. Theo could just see it move. A shell clanged into the breech. “Fire!” Witt yelled.
“On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt answered. As he spoke, the big gun roared. Flame leaped from the end of the muzzle, and out to either side of the recoil-reducing muzzle brake.
Then Theo used another word: “Hit!”
Flame and smoke burst from a Russian panzer he hadn’t even seen till the big gun spoke. It was more than a kilometer away. When he peered out through the armor glass in his narrow vision slit, he couldn’t tell whether the crew escaped. Part of him hoped so-they were members of his guild, in a manner of speaking. But they’d try again to kill him if they did. Maybe hoping they died fast and without much pain was better.