Stalemate (The Red Gambit Series) (18 page)

The machine-gun
platoon was not the direct target, but the Katyusha was a notoriously inaccurate weapon, fit for area strikes, not precision hits.

Seventeen rockets landed in an area of fifty metres by sixty metres.

2nd Platoon of the 1st Independent Machine Gun Battalion ceased to exist.

Many of the other rockets
found themselves hitting water, either exploding on contact with the surface or disappearing beneath the lake, permanently consigned to the Brahmsee.

The remainder spent themselves in and around the positions of 2nd Kompagnie, rending the ground and the soft bodies of men equally.

Seeing the strike throw body parts in the air, Yolkov leapt up and screamed for his men to follow him, rushing the bridge.

The Vickers were
all silent, a fact Hauptfeldwebel Schränkel noted through his extreme pain, two hot fragments of rocket casing lodged in his stomach.

Nonetheless
, he served the gun.

Its gunner was dead, victim of the Katyusha strike, but the MG42 was intact, as was the white-faced loader.

The machine-gun started its work, lashing the bridge with small, controlled bursts. Men dropped, smashed to the ground by the impacts.

The body armour of the SMG troopers saved many a life, although exposed limbs received savage treatment at
the hands of the MG42’s intense fire.

Gritting his teeth as the recoil
jarred his shoulder, agitating the shrapnel in his belly, the Hauptfeldwebel shouted at his number two.

“Ammunition, you idiot! Another belt!”

As he fired the last of his belt, the Soviets went to ground.

The young grenadiere showed the empty ammunition box by way of response.

“Go and get some
, Hannermann! Raus!”

Bullets zipped around the position, one clipping the ammo box and sending it flying from the loader’s hands.

Petrified, the young grenadiere hugged the earth, crying, urinating, defecating, and calling for his mother.

Schränkel looked at the boy with a mixture of pity and disgust. He hawked and spat fresh blood
, before setting himself to locate more ammunition.

At the bridge, Yolkov had turned, his men rooted to the spot. Walking back and forth, screaming at the hiding soldiers, he threatened execution and reward in equal measure, but nothing he could do brought any response from those lying in the dubious cover of the side of the watercourse.

Furious, Yolkov gestured at the German positions, encouraged by the slackening fire, and the obvious damage wrought by the Katyusha strike.

One or two men started to rise, and the movement became infectious.

Satisfied, Yolkov turned back to face the enemy and ran, his armour clanking, as the metal panels clashed in time with his urgent movements.

Less than a hundred metres away, an MG42 hungrily received a new belt of cartridges and was brought to bear.

With a sound like tearing cloth, it spat out its bullets, and many found gaps in the metal protection, ripping Yolkov to shreds, and sending his bloodied corpse tumbling back amongst those who had started to follow.

A DP gunner, calmer than the rest, had set himself up beside a tree stump and returned fire accurately.

Five bullets struck the NCO.

Two took Schränkel in the shoulder, another added to the misery of damage inflicted upon his stomach, the final two striking
symmetrically above and below his left elbow.

His screams pierced the mists envelop
ing the loader, the subsequent sight of his Hauptfeldwebel smashed and bleeding, proving more of a curiosity rather than tipping him over the edge.

Shuffling low to the wounded NCO’s side, he started to pull at the bloodied tunic top.

Schränkel slapped his ministrations away with his good hand.

“There, Hannermann, there!
Give them every bullet, boy. Keep the schwein away from our position!”

Like an automaton, the young grenadiere swept up the MG42, hefting its bulk in his right hand and feeding the belt with his left.

Russian soldiers fell regularly until he fired his last round. Somehow it kept firing, despite the risk of bullets jamming in the expanding red hot barrel. With no time for a barrel change, he dropped the weapon to the ground.

Hannermann
pulled out his Walther and fired single shots, being occasionally rewarded with the obvious signs of a hit, and once, a red mist from a shattered head.

Again
, a weapon was emptied and discarded, thrown with venom at the rapidly approaching avenging infantry.

The MP18 that Schränkel had been carrying lay where he had placed it, and the
young grenadiere snatched it up, cocking it in one easy motion.

Stuffing the spare magazine in his belt, Hannermann quickly cast his eye around the battlefield.

A few of his comrades were returning fire, but 2nd Kompagnie was in danger of being overrun.

Incredibly,
Hannermann attacked, screaming in a voice stimulated by his temporary lunacy.

The lead two Russians dropped, victims of fire from elsewhere in 2nd Kompagnie’s positions.

Behind him, the JagdPanzer took a direct hit, found out by an 85mm on the south bank.

Framed perfectly by the sudden explosion, Hannermann looked almost demonic, stained by the blood of his
wounded gunner, wide-eyed with a combination of terror and battle madness.

Through the mists of his pain, Schränkel watched the young man attack, one man against forty.

The forty retreated, the one pursued, putting a bullet in a running back here and there.

Those who watched on
were incredulous, never to forget the sight.

Scrabbling back into the
temporary bosom of the waters, a number of stouter Soviet hearts turned to resist.

T34’s started to move up, encouraged by the fiery death of the tank killer opposite, giving heart to the
Siberian infantrymen.

A Mosin rifle bullet punched into the grenadiere’s groin, taking his breath away and
dropping him onto the ground. Two more bullets found him there, both legs made useless by the hits.

Up on one elbow, he discarded the empty magazine and slip
ped in his only spare, the act of cocking the weapon proving difficult, as blood loss started to take its toll.

A Panzer III, its 50mm gun spitting defiance, m
anouevred to get position on the bridge, knowing that if the T34’s crossed, its own existence would be short and spectacular.

Three d
irect hits were shrugged off, the superior armour of the Tridsat proving too much for the 50mm.

An 85mm shell ended the unequal fight, burrowing its way into the
German’s fighting compartment and starting a fire.

The crew bailed out, leaving their vehicle to burn unchecked.

The lead T34 crossed the bridge at speed, a grape of ten men from the 3rd Battalion clinging to its handholds, fearful of being thrown from the bucking vehicle.

Passing
the prone Hannermann at speed, the Soviets failed to understand the threat until it was too late. Sub-machine gun bullets plucked them from their perches.

Two men remained in place, the rest lay in the wake of the vehicle, and only one of those showed any signs of life.

The young grenadiere swivelled to face the new threat, an approaching sound filling his senses.

The MP18 stuttered in defiance as a solid track supporting 32 tons of metal covered the distance from
head to toe in under a second, squashing Hannermann into the Muhlen Straβe, transforming him into an indescribable bloody mess, held together only by his clothing.

Across the battlefield, the Centurion MkI of Lance-Sergeant Charles, having dealt with all the tanks supporting the Penal Unit,
had turned its attention elsewhere, and saw the end of the unequal struggle.

Witnessing the
horrible end of the German soldier through his sight, Lance-Corporal Patterson growled his target acquisition, determined to avenge the brave man.

The order came
, and a projectile leapt from the 17pdr, crossing the battlefield in the blink of an eye before carving a hole in the waters beyond.

“You missed
, you tosser!”

Actually he hadn’t, the APDS shell penetration
was so extreme that it had gone straight through the second tank in line and out the other side.

The damaged vehicle slowed, its driver lacking clear instructions from the dead commander.

“I hit the bastard, Sarn’t, its smoking!”

“Then hit him again
, Pats!”

The main gun boomed again, and this time the T34 died, the shell wrecking the engine and starting a roaring fire.

The lead T34 was running amok over the German positions, repeatedly crushing men, its tracks red with the blood of its victims.

A shell from the last surviving vehicle of the 160th’s
Panzer unit dispatched the tank. The Marder III 139 mounted a captured Soviet 76.2mm weapon, more than capable of killing the Tridsat.

Another
Soviet tank exploded, marking another kill for the Guards’ Centurion, and the remaining tanks seemed to hesitate as one.

Perhaps inspired by
Hannermann, the remaining grenadieres rose up and charged, screaming at the top of their voices, encouraged by the withdrawing Soviet armour.

The
German Kommando rushed forward, urged on by their elderly commanders, who remembered the SturmTruppen assaults of another era.

And then, within seconds of each other...

The 3rd Battalion broke.

The SMG C
ompany broke.

The Guards T
anks broke.

The
Soviet left flank caved in completely.

The
German 3rd Kompagnie, supported by the rampant Kommando, drove the Siberian 2nd Battalion survivors from the high ground, mercilessly hacking down the running men, wide backs proving inviting targets.

Next to be rolled up were the survivors of the penal unit, the kilted
Scots of the 6th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, launching a swift attack around the Manhagenersee Bridge and testing frightened men who needed little encouragement to run, the more so as most of the NKVD security team lay dead upon the field.

The remainder of the Irish Guards and Royal Scots completed the rout, a screaming bayonet charge proving too much for the destroyed engineer unit.

Unfortunately, the Irish pushed too far and ran into the surviving tanks of the 1st Tank Group, whose machine-guns and high explosive killed many a son of Ireland in the moment of victory.

The two Cromwell
s, the only other surviving tanks from the Grenadier Guards, pushed up to the northernmost bridge, and helped the retreating Soviet troopers on their way.

The route b
etween the two bodies of water, Brahmsee and Manhagenersee, had been an inviting route, seemingly a gap to be exploited, and the Soviets had hastily assaulted it in an effort to turn the Allied defences.

It was an unmitigated disaster
for the Red Army, one that virtually destroyed every unit that the Red Army had committed, leaving many dead upon the field.

Not without cost to the Allies, the remnants of
58th’s 2nd and 3rd Kompagnies joined together to form one under-strength unit. Barely one platoon of the MG company was still able to function.

N
ight brought an end to the sporadic shooting that had kept the fighting around the Manhagenersee alive.

The Royal Scots amounted to seven unwounded men

The King’s Own mustered twenty fit for parade.

‘A’ Company
, 3rd Battalion Irish Guards, consisted of forty-eight men under the command of a wounded Lance-Sergeant, with another thirty-nine wounded to varying degrees.

Perhaps the most remarkable r
esult of the Brahmsee battle was the casualties inflicted upon the command structures, officers of all ranks seemingly culled across the range of formations on both sides.

The
Soviet force withdrew in disarray, and, as was the habit, the higher authorities looked for scapegoats.

Only two
Soviet officers survived the experience, both Junior Lieutenants, one from the Penal Company, the other from the Regimental staff.

To satisfy the baying
of those desperate for scapegoats, the former was executed by the NKVD security troops before dawn rose, the stories of a monster enemy tank lost in the clamour for retribution.

On the Allied side, a late afternoon ground attack by a single Shturmovik robbed the Grenadier Guards of their
surviving officer, his crew, and their Cromwell.