The perimeter of the defensive position had been weak. Just a squad of panzergrenadiers. A total of eight men with two machine guns and four rifles. One of the machine gun teams had gone in the first second of the attack, a grenade thrown out of the trees had landed in the pit beside them, killing both men instantly. Then there had been the roar of rifle, machine gun and machine-pistol fire. It had been followed by the sight of the white-clad partisans and ski-troops slipping through the trees to assault the paper-thin defense line.
Both sides had been blasting off ammunition at each other. That was something else that had changed since 1941. Now virtually every soldier had an automatic, or at least semi-automatic, weapon. Attacks tended to be concentrations of automatic fire poured at the other side. The hope was to pin them down until the artillery got them. Only, there was no artillery in this battle. The partisans had light mortars only, weapons that were of little use in the dense trees. Their rounds exploded in the treetops, scattering down light fragments but without the power to do crippling damage. The German unit had Heim’s four surviving 150mm self-propelled guns but they had been lined up on where the train would have to appear and men would have to work on the torn-up tracks. The gun was in a limited-traverse housing. Turning the whole vehicle around just wasn’t going to be possible.
So, this battle was infantryman against infantryman and would be decided by the weapons they carried. And the numbers on each side of course. There, the partisans had an advantage. They had struck the weakest part of the German position. Already they were wearing the defenses down. The partisans themselves weren’t normally the best of soldiers. Today, the Siberians were mixed in with them and they could stand toe-to-toe with the best Germany had to offer. The squad guarding the rear wasn’t going to last much longer. Then, Heim knew he would be fighting as an infantryman again.
“Pass word out, all the gun crews, get ready. Man the machine gun with two men per gun. The rest of you, get rifles and get between the vehicles.” Each one of the self-propelled guns had an MG-45 machine gun mounted on the gun casement for exactly this emergency. They would act as pillboxes while the rest of the crews prevented the enemy getting too close.
A single figure dressed in white suddenly backed out of the woods. He was firing his rifle from the hip, short bursts ripping out at an unseen enemy following him. “Kameraden!” The word rang through the waiting guns. The man turned and ran for the guns. He dived into cover as he reached the illusion of protection offered by their steel shapes.
“Come here.” Heim’s voice was sharp and insistent. The man quickly mounted the self-propelled gun and dropped into the fighting compartment. “What is happening.”
“Partisans. And ski troops. They have chewed us up, I am the only one left. There are hundreds of them.”
Heim shook his head. There weren’t, it just seemed like that. His mind flipped back to that winter offensive of 1941/42 and the Siberians sliding through the snow. They had harried their enemies the way wolves brought down their prey. “We’ll hold them here. Join the men by the guns.”
The MG-45 was already loaded and waiting. Heim pulled back the charging lever and nestled down behind the gun. It wouldn’t be long now. His eyes ran along the nearest group of trees, was there movement already from behind them? The butt of the machine gun fitted neatly into his shoulder and he squeezed the trigger gently. The movement sent a short burst into the suspect trees. That broke the brief silence that had descended on the battlefield. A hail of return fire ricocheted off the armor of his self-propelled gun. Heim briefly thanked the gods of war that the fire was from rifles only. The self-propelled guns only had armor to protect them against rifle-caliber weapons. Anything more would go through and bounce around inside.
His men were returning fire. Their StG-44s cracked out quick bursts as the gunners tried to spot the muzzle flashes of the approaching Russians and pin them down. Firing was spreading quickly along the line of self-propelled guns. The machine guns laced the treeline with tracers, the riflemen filled in the gaps. On the other side, the automatic weapons carried by the partisans returned a growing volume of fire. Heim noted that for all the sound and fury of the fire exchange, nobody actually seemed to get hit. Idly the mathematician’s part of his mind, the part no artilleryman could do without, wondered just how many rounds got fired from these assault rifles and machine pistols to get a kill, and how that compared with the old bolt-action weapons. It sometimes seemed as if we have replaced one round that hits with a lot that don’t.
That idle speculation didn’t last long. Nor did it stop Heim from raking the woodline with his machine gun. The problem now wasn’t ammunition, it was heat build-up on the barrel. Carry on like this and the barrel will burn out. Over on the left, the gun at the extreme end of the line stopped firing. Either the gunner inside had been hit or his weapon had jammed. Almost at once, the weight of Russian fire shifted to that section. Heim saw more white-clad figures moving through the snow towards the silent vehicle. Their fire was pinning down the men next to the vehicle. Soon, they would be close enough to blast them out with hand grenades. Heim switched his fire to the new threat. He saw his burst of fire tumble down three or four of the ghostly figures. Then he had to duck as almost every gun the Russians had concentrated on him. He hadn’t heard such a concentration of ringing since the church bells at his wedding. His wife’s family had been overjoyed at the ceremony. That hadn’t surprised Heim, their first baby had been born seven months later.
He shook his head, clearing the memory out and peeked over the edge of the armor. He was just in time to see a gray-black cloud of smoke flash from the ground. A rolling explosion enveloped the side of the gun. Either an RPG-1 or a captured Panzerfaust he thought. He’d heard the Americans had copied the Panzerfaust and were building them in a new factory in Siberia. Rumor had it they were building so many that every Russian soldier would carry one. That was only fair, the Germans had copied the American Bazooka as their Panzerschreck. The stricken self-propelled gun was already starting to burn. The petrol engine used by the British tank that served as its chassis would see the fire quickly become terminal.
That didn’t take long at all. The fire took hold and reached the ammunition store. The gun exploded in a brilliant white flash that scattered great burning trails across the snow. Three guns left and the Russians were closing in fast. It hadn’t taken long for them to exploit the destruction of the gun. They used the cloud of black smoke from the burning vehicle to cover their approach. Heim thought quickly. The Panzerfaust has a range of around 30–60 meters depending on the version the Russians had captured. If they seized the position around the burning gun, they could open fire on the next vehicle and roll the whole artillery position up. It was time to do something about that.