Determined to go quickly, to broach the Kiel Canal at the earliest moment, only the few units at hand were tasked with the initial breakthrough, others already moving to take advantage once the line was broken.
For the Allies, a handful of His Majesty’s Guards were swiftly reinforced with some of the German Grenadiere units of the 160th Division, straight from their hard fighting around Ellerdorf.
The orders issued to the soldiers on both sides were straightforward, devoid of frills, brutal in their simplicity.
Red Army commanders exhorted their men to smash the capitalists and break through the line, regardless of losses. Sometimes encouraging their men with threats, sometimes with the sweet taste of vodka, the officers prepared to drive their soldiers into the narrow Brahmsee Gap.
Across the smallest divide, that was No Man’s land, Allied and German officers made sure their men understood the simplest yet most feared of orders from above.
‘Hold your positions at all costs!’
The Irish Guards had been fighting without a break for days on end, and the casualties had mounted.
The arrival of the Katyusha rockets on their positions caused havoc, killing and wounding indiscriminately, destroying trenches and foxholes, sometimes burying men alive to die in silent, indescribable horror.
‘A’ Company had been reinforced with men from the disbanded 15th Scottish Division, and platoons of 6th KOSB and 8th Royal Scots shared the suffering in the opening salvo.
The 60th Guards immediately commenced relocating, the new procedure adopted by the hard-pressed Soviet artillery and rocket troops, desperate to avoid the accurate counter-battery fire.
That fire came and, even though 60th Guards moved quickly, the mixture of high explosives and fragmentation shells still claimed lives and destroyed three launchers.
Men of the 13th Engineer Sapper Brigade moved up with the six T-34/76’s, slowly moving from cover to cover, approaching a small round wooded hillock occupied by a nest of enemy machine-guns, all of which were firing rapidly, claiming a engineer infantryman with every burst.
The T-34’s halted and started to put HE shells on the position, throwing up gouts of earth, occasionally stained with the blood of an allied soldier.
To the southeast of the Guards position, the second group of T-34’s, a mix of 76mm and 85mm gun versions, commenced their tentative advance, their route being more open and exposed. The supporting penal infantry knowing they had been handed a murderous mission.
Seven hundred yards away, Lance-Corporal Patterson was locked on his target, patiently waiting for the order to fire.
He adjusted as the enemy tank moved forward a few yards, angling for a better shot at the hillock. The lens also betrayed some of the Penal soldiers, scuttling into cover as the defensive fire grew in volume.
One soldier was struck in the head, his blood and brains splattering the side of the tank that he was moving past.
Automatically, Patterson screwed up his nose in disgust, as automatically as he discharged his 17pdr and sent its lethal APDS shell on its way.
The T-34’s armour yielded as the high-velocity dart penetrated with ease, the driver uncomprehending as it passed through him and into the body of the tank beyond.
Smashing into the breechblock, the APDS shell was deflected upwards, exiting through the rear upper plate in a blur of white sparks, taking the life of the Penal company commander. He had climbed up to liaise with the tank crew and was just leaning into the open hatch.
The gunner, only just realising he had lost both hands to the enemy shell, started to scream, his panic infectious. The commander and hull machine-gunner scrambled to escape, leaving the amputee to try and lever himself out on bloody stumps.
Neither escaping crewmember was hit by the bullets that spanged off the armour as they sought cover.
A second shell struck their tank, entering in at the front plate and burying itself in the engine block, starting a small but earnest fire.
As the gunner was a new man to the crew, neither of them was prepared to risk himself to save him, and those on the battlefield on both sides became aware of an animal-like howling as the fire spread.
The remaining T-34’s adjusted their positions, desperately seeking the powerful weapon that had already killed one of their number.
Screwing his eyes up, the Senior Lieutenant commanding the Second Section thought he saw something, his suspicions confirmed as the ‘lump’ lit up, betrayed by the muzzle spitting flame.
The shell sped across the battlefield, heading straight at him in tank 231.
Half a second of terror was ended by a simple clang, as the shell clipped the left side of the turret and went on its way, leaving a thin and gleaming silver stripe in the green painted metal.
“Driver, move right, now! Gunner, enemy tank at 11 o’clock, load armour piercing! You have it?”
“No, Comrade. Wait, I see it.”
“Driver, halt.”
Waiting for the rocking motion to cease, in order to give his gunner the best possible chance, Balianov judged the moment perfectly.
“Fire!”
The 76.2mm F32 spat its shell at the indistinct enemy vehicle, and the gunner showed why he was considered the best of his unit.
The armour-piercing shell hit the British tank on the glacis plate. It bounced off without penetrating, but wiped away most of the camouflage foliage that had been stacked around it to mask its presence.
Balianov had been studying his enemy silhouettes, but the vehicle he saw emerge from the ravaged greenery did not figure in the Soviet intelligence documents available to him.
“Driver, move left, into the gully!”
The experienced tank officer saw enough to know that it was a big tank with a big gun, and that his chances of survival had just got a lot worse.
231 slipped out of sight before Patterson could get off a shot, so he turned his attention to one of the other two T-34’s, 233, stationary, and believing itself concealed behind a large hedge.
The tank commander, Lance-Sergeant Charles, had already ordered a change to conventional rounds, the APDS shells far too good for the modest armour of the Tridsat Chetverka’s.
A standard armour-piercing round crossed no man’s land, eating up the yards in the blink of an eye, smashing into the nearside track and front sprocket of 233, destroying both before moving on and becoming lodged in the rear drive sprocket, jamming it in place.
The crew were made of stern stuff, and tried to fight their tank, sending a shell back almost immediately.
It missed, and buried itself in the ground, short of Route 36 to the north.
233 died dramatically, a solid shot penetrated and triggered an internal explosion that displaced the turret, causing it to flail away and come to rest, twenty yards from the burning hull.
The surviving anti-tank guns of Irish Guards opened up, scoring hits, but failing to kill any of the targets in front of them.
The penal troops had moved away from the tanks, conscious that they were not safe near them, pressing forward, not running upright, but hugging the ground or crawling.
Balianov had slipped out of his tank and moved up to the edge of the dip in which 231 had concealed itself, his binoculars studying the enemy tank, taking in its powerful lines.
To the north, the engineers had gone to ground, as the machine gun fire consumed their resolve. Most of their leadership was lying dead or wounded amongst the felled trunks and piles of severed foliage.
A PIAT shell had transformed the lead T-34 into a torch, outdoing the sun in its illumination, before internal explosions eventually displaced the upper hull plates and ended the display.
The British anti-tank weapon and its crew lay in pieces, two HE rounds having exacted revenge.