As if to confirm his opinion, a barrage of shots rang out. A few rifles but mostly the ripping noise of the PPS-45s and the slow, heavy thud of the American M-3s. The bullets ricocheted off the tree stumps and tore through the piles of broken branches that now covered his front. The partisans had taken the opportunity of the disruption caused by the airstrike to push forward until they were within almost touching distance of the German positions. The rattle of gunfire was joined by the heavier thud of grenades, Kolchak guessed what was happening now, the partisans had closed up to the point where the submachine gunners were keeping a foxhole pinned down while the grenadiers tossed their weapons into it. His positions had been mutually supporting but the combination of the strike and the mist was interrupting those plans.
“Sergeant, send a runner back to Colonel Asbach. Tell him we’re falling back, trying to establish a new perimeter. Everybody else, drop back, at least 50 meters. Try and get some separation from the Ivans.”
Kolchek started to scramble backwards. If he could get his men back, they could set up a new line. It would be better-placed that the compromised position he was being forced to abandon. He had in a position in mind. It was where a shallow depression ran through the pine trees. Probably the remnant of a path or game trail. Once his men were set up there, they could establish a front line that could hold. The problem was that this would leave the rearguard and artillery positions hanging. Well, that was for them to worry about, the Colonel would have to warn them.
Floundering through the snow, Kolchek saw the depression ahead of him. He also saw something else, sets of long parallel lines in the snow. He looked at them for a second before the significance of them sunk in. That was just a second too long. As he realized he was looking at ski-tracks, the Siberians in the ditch he was relying on opened fire on the men retreating towards them. Kolchek was one of the first to go down, hit over a dozen times by the spraying burst from a PPS-45. As he bled out on the ground he saw his men being cut down by the Siberians to their rear and the partisans closing in from the front.
Knyaz watched the Hitlerites being shot down with grim glee. As the two American sturmoviks had swept overhead, he had led a group of his ski-troops through a small gap that existed between the fascist flank and rear positions. They had been screened by the trees, the developing mist, the blast from the bombs and the raking bursts of gunfire from the air. His men had moved in behind the fascists and occupied a good position. Then the Hitlerites had disengaged and tried to set up a new defense line. Knyaz and his men had held their fire to the last second before opening up with a withering barrage of automatic fire. Instinctively, the fascists who had survived that first blast of gunfire had recoiled from it and fallen back. Straight into another burst of gunfire from the partisans following up the fascist retreat.
Knyaz had done the same thing before, many times since the grim days before Moscow in the winter of 1941. The fascists hadn’t understood what fighting Siberians had meant back then. Now they knew. They rued the day the Siberian divisions had arrived on the European front. Today was another, and the Hitlerite bodies covering the ground in front of his position were proof of that.
“Bratishka, we have much more to do.” Knyaz thought quickly. The whole German rear was hanging in the air with nothing between his troops and the German command post in the center. “Now, we must help the partisans fighting the fascist artillery. Let us take their gun positions from the rear and show them what it means to fight with the bayonet!”
It sounded good but Knyaz knew it wouldn’t come to that. This battle was being fought with grenades and sub-machine guns and they would clear the fascist artillery out of their positions.
Captain Lang heard the gunfire erupting from the trees behind him. A novice he might be, he was grimly aware now of how little he really knew of warfare. The thought of his behavior when he had first arrived made his stomach cramp with humiliation. Yes, a novice I might be but I can tell that the gunfire and the grenade blasts were indeed behind me. Quite a long way behind me, tens of meters at a guess. He closed his eyes for a second and thought. What would he do if he was the Ivan? He knew the answer because it was straight out of the book. Swing around, pivot his advance and take the gun positions from the rear. With infantry in front and behind, the gunners would be cut down and the pieces would be taken. That could not be.
“Sergeant, get the men together. We’ll cover you while your crews start up the guns. They’ll have to break out, try to join the Colonel in the center. He’ll know what to do. Hurry up man, the Ivans are closing in on us.”
Sergeant Heim needed no encouragement to hurry. Unlike Lang, he was a veteran and he knew that the Ivan ski-troops would be on him very soon. To emphasize that message, a Panzerfaust flew out of the mist and trees. It exploded on the ground, a few meters short of one of the three remaining self-propelled guns. That enthused the crew far more than any verbal exhortations could have done and the gun started to move out. As it did so, a second Panzerfaust exploded in the mud where it had been just a few second earlier. Heim watched the other guns starting to back up while Lang’s handful of infantrymen tried to pin down the partisans advancing from the front.
The gunners were doing their best, Heim knew it, Lang knew it, but time was critically short and conditions were not good. One thing saved the guns, they had been positioned to fire on where the train would be arriving and that was the direction they had to go. So, the drivers were in a better position to move their vehicles, they could see where they were going. And their vehicles were faster going forward. And old joke ran through Heim’s mind but he dismissed it with irritation. Who knew how Italian tanks would perform? They’d never been seen on the Russian Front.
Russian was a remarkably good language for cursing and Knyaz used the available vocabulary to the full. The Hitlerites had guessed his move and were pulling their guns out. The whole rear of the German position was crumbling. The guns and their infantry cover were retreating away from his men and the partisans. The latter were doing their best; they fired their captured Panzerfausts with abandon. The explosions flowered all over the positions the fascists had been holding. But they were missed the guns. That wasn’t surprising, the Panzerfaust was an abominably inaccurate and short-ranged weapon. Knyaz waved his arm and his men started to shift diagonally backwards. They were trying to close in on the gun positions before they could be evacuated. His men fired on the fascists, sending them tumbling down but too few. The guns were getting clear.
Two of the three survivors did. The third, the last to get moving, couldn’t quite get out of range fast enough. One Panzerfaust hit it in the tracks. The rocket blew off the forward idler and a road wheel. The track broke and the self-propelled gun spun around and stopped. A second Panzerfaust hit the side of the boxy gun compartment and sent steel fragments howling around inside the structure. Knyaz saw the surviving crew abandon the vehicle. Almost without thinking he and his men opened fire, cutting them down in a hail of sub-machine gun fire.