Cauldron of Blood (24 page)

‘
Klar
...
klar
....’ the answers came back rapidly from his pilots.

‘
All right, follow me, we’re going down!’

Like
a hawk spotting its prey, von Igel’s plane dropped from the sky, its sirens screaming terrifyingly, followed by the others, hurtling downwards at three hundred kilo¬metres an hour until it seemed to the watchers below that the pilot must smash into the ground. At three hundred metres, however, von Igel jerked back the controls, his body pressed hard against his seat, his eyes seeming about to pop from their sockets, his teeth bared wolfishly.

Behind
him the others did the same. ‘Watch out for flak, boys!’ He screamed. ‘All right, Black Eagles... we
attack
!’

As
one, with their wings not more than twenty metres apart, the four planes roared down in a line, scudding over the ground, coming in from the sun to blind the Soviet gunners, ignoring the tracer rushing at them from all sides, not even seeing the men below standing on the bonnets of the halftracks waving up at them madly, concentrating solely on the enemy.

The
line of armour grew ever larger. Now they could make out individual vehicles. Von Igel, gaze fixed on his own target — a large command vehicle — flicked the gun controls on and bent his face over the sight.

The
tank loomed larger and larger. He could see the white face of its commander as he ducked behind the turret for protection.
Three
hundred
metres
...
two
hundred
and
fifty
...
one
hundred
and
seventy
-
five
... It was now or never. He pressed the trigger. The Stuka seemed to stop in mid-air, as if it had run into an invisible wall. Next instant it had jumped at least fifty metres and the white blob of an anti-tank shell was searing through the air straight at its target. At the very last moment von Igel had the presence of mind to break to the left, as directly beneath him the huge ten-ton turret of the tank heaved and trembled and then seemingly effortlessly rose high into the air.

WHAM
!...
WHAM
!...
WHAM
! The seventy-five millimetre shells slammed into the first-line of Russian tanks, as von Igel shrieked in at treetop height for another run, his plane rocking from side to side with the force of the explosions from down below as tank after tank disintegrated.

Again
he thundered to within two hundred metres of the burning Russian line, with panic-stricken tankmen running for cover everywhere, leaving behind them their shattered vehicles. Again he pressed the button. The Stuka seemed to halt in mid-air once more, cringing under that tremendous strain, its rivets zinging off into space, the metal shrieking its protest, and then with a thunderous ear-splitting scream, it was sailing high into the air, leaving behind it another shattered, fiercely burning T-34.

The
massacre of the Soviet armour was well underway.

*

‘Come on you heroes,’ Schulze grunted, two rifles slung over his shoulder, in addition to his own empty pistol. ‘Don’t tell me Adolf’s darlings are a bunch of wet-tails.’ He pointed to the Soviet tanks scattered everywhere and beyond them the little circle of halftracks, already revving their engines preparatory to moving off, as the attacking Stukas snarled round in another tight turn for a further attack. ‘That’s home boys. Come on....’ With the last of his strength he stumbled forward, chanting his old exhortation,
‘
Follow
me
,
follow
me
,
the
captain’s
got
a
hole
in
his
arse
!’

They
had nearly done it now…

*

Von Igel flew one last sortie, but what was left of the Russian tanks were scuttling towards the cover of the fir forest beyond the ridge and he didn’t fire. He wanted to save some shells for the attack on the river-line. Thus he was the unknown spectator of the link-up of what was left of the Wotan troopers and
Obersturmbannfuhrer
Peiper just one minute before the young colonel had been about to give the command to move out.

Zooming
in low, throttling back to lower his speed, and followed by the rest of his Black Eagles, he wiggled his wings at the upturned faces beneath to indicate that they should follow him now.

Peiper
dropped Schulze’s hand and acknowledged with a quick wave, crying upwards, though he knew the pilots grinning down at him couldn’t possibly hear, ‘My God, if we get out of this mess, I’ll buy you all a crate of champus!’

‘
A whole bath-tub full each, sir!’ Schulze yelled and sat down suddenly, his weary legs giving way beneath him. ‘A swimming pool full of the....’ And with that he fainted.

*

Two hours later in a brilliantly executed lightning attack in the best tradition of the
Bodyguard
, and covered by the Black Eagles’ blazing seventy-fives, the survivors crashed through the Russian positions on the river-line, sending the surprised Ivans fleeing in terror, and allowing them to ford it without a single casualty.

Exactly
thirty minutes later, an embarrassed Fireball was reading them out the Fuhrer’s personal telegram of congratulations, while outside his seething veterans were toiling away to clear an emergency landing strip for the transports which would take the survivors to the Fuhrer’s HQ for a personal reception by the Greatest Captain of All Times.

The
big break-out was over.

ENVOI

‘Hit the sauce and hit the chow, and grab a little arse while yer can, cos there ain’t much in life for a common old soldier-man.’

The
Sayings
of
Sergeant
Schulze

It was the custom in the Ukraine to celebrate Christmas on the Fifth of January. Even after twenty years of aetheist communist domination and two of German occupation, the villages of the occupied Ukraine did so that winter of 1943.

All
that snowy afternoon, the sweating kerchieved peasant women cooked the traditional twelve vegetable dishes which symbolized the twelve apostles; while their straw-haired, freckled children, already seated at the festively decorated table, with the traditional bundle of straw beneath it, gazed longingly out of the steamed-up little windows to catch a glimpse of the first star — the signal for the great feast to commence.

But
on January 5th, 1943, the children of the Ukrainian village of Vinnitsa, close to the German dictator’s HQ, were treated to a sight more exciting than that of the first star; a sight which would remain in the memories of those who survived the occupation and war as long as they lived.

It
was that of three very drunken Germans staggering crazily down the shabby main street, seemingly looking for a place to spend the night. One was an enormous man with the black-and-white ribbon of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross around his neck. In one hand he clutched a magnum-bottle of champagne; in his other he gripped the great dug of a woman, not much smaller than himself, who also had a medal pinned to her tremendous bosom. Behind the two giants trotted a little wizened runt of a fellow, bottle in both hands, his open blouse stuffed with half a dozen more, trying to keep up with them the best he could.

Wide-eyed
and awed the children followed their progress, as singing drunkenly in their own impossible tongue, they hammered at doors which remained stubbornly closed to them, until finally in an outburst of temper, the giant with the Knight’s Cross, kicked open the door to Farmer Bolkov’s barn to disappear inside, still clutching the woman’s enormous breast, and crying in broken Russian for all to hear:
‘
The
Workers’
and
Peasants’
Republic
...
I’ve
shat
it
!...
They
can’t
even
get
the
date
of
Christmas
shittingly
well
right
...’

*

Thus Sergeant Schulze, the newest holder of the Knight’s Cross, vanished from the awed gaze of the young watchers, to celebrate his decoration and his second Christmas of that year in his usual riotous and reprehensible fashion, which culminated with the barn falling down on top of the snoring celebrators in the middle of the night. They snored on.

Schulze
would live to celebrate many more Christmases in the same unpraiseworthy manner when all the others — Matzi, his running-mate, the Butcher, his enemy, the Vulture, and his beloved CO von Dodenburg — were long dead.
SS
Schulze
, as he became known after the war in the working class districts of his native Hamburg, seemed indestructible, in spite of twenty half-litres of good
Holsten
beer and a similar number of
Korn
chasers a-day and his habit of chewing razor-blades when he was drunk — which was most of the time.

Indeed
SS
Schulze
lived on for another thirty-odd years after the war, to be feared and loved in the red-light district of Hamburg’s notorious St Pauli in which he lived. Even at the age of seventy, a pensioner from the docks where he had worked ever since he had deserted from the Foreign Legion, the pros, the ponces, the pimps and the pushers who inhabit that part of the great port treated him with well-deserved respect. When he came staggering into one of the dingy bars of the district, accompanied by his ugly boxer bitch Gerda, the pimps would slide out quickly and the pushers would cease their little games. For even at that age
SS
Schulze
was a man to be feared. When he was roused, which was often, it did not take long for his Hamburger Equalizer, as he called his brass-knuckles, to appear, accompanied by his usual challenge of: ‘
One
word
from
you
lot
and
you’ll
be
lacking
a
set
of
ears
in
no
seconds
flat
!’

Yet
he was loved too. He gave freely to drop-outs, children and, naturally — how could it be otherwise? — to ageing whores. He loved animals and he had risked his life to dive into a freezingly cold Alster to rescue his dog, which someone had been trying to drown because it was so ugly. Gerda — ‘God knows where I got the name? I think it comes from a piece of gash I once slipped a link of salami to’ — was the idol of his declining years. And indeed it was an emaciated, dying Gerda — she had refused to leave the body for food for nearly seven days— who finally alerted the neighbours in that dingy tenement house that her master was dead.

Half
St Pauli turned out for the funeral. The other half would have come too, in spite of the torrential rain, but the generous wake of the previous evening, provided by the dead man’s savings, had made
Bierleichen
of them all. They stayed in bed, with vinegar bandages pressed to aching heads, listening to the thump-thump of the
Hofbrauhaus
brass band, risking a stiff fine for illegally playing that bold marching song that the young men of SS Assault Battalion Wotan had sung so lustily so long before:

Blow
the
bugle
,
beat
the
drum

Clear
the
street
,
here
comes
Wo
-
tan

Steel
is
our
weapon

To
hew
through
bone

Blood
our
purpose

Wotan
hold
close
!

For
Death
is
our
Destiny
....

Thus
SS
Schulze
went to his grave, cocking a snout at authority to the very last, as he had done throughout his life....

If you enjoyed
Cauldron of Blood
you might be interested in
Guns at Cassino
by Leo Kessler, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Guns at Cassino
by Leo Kessler