And, the way things worked these days, keeping track of how many Russians you slaughtered wasn’t the only game in town, or the most important one. Making sure the Russians didn’t slaughter you had become much more urgent. Their light tanks were nothing German panzers couldn’t handle. Even in a thinly armored Panzer II, Theo hadn’t worried about them much.
But the KV-1 was a whole different kettle of cabbage. Yes, it was clumsy and slow, but it was about the size of a whale. A Panzer III, the Wehrmacht ’s main battle machine, could hurt it only by luck or from behind. Had the Ivans had more of the damned things or used them with greater skill, the KV-1s could have been even worse news than they were anyhow.
As for the T-34… It was hot inside the Panzer III, but thinking about the Reds’ newest and finest panzer made Theo shiver all the same. It had all the KV-1’s virtues-a powerful engine, thick armor, and a big gun-and, so far as he could see, none of the other beast’s vices. T-34s weren’t slow and clumsy. Anything but, in fact. And whoever’d come up with their armor scheme deserved the biggest, gaudiest medal Stalin could pin on him.
German engineers had never considered armor shape, except perhaps insofar as the simplest shapes were also the easiest to manufacture. If you needed more protection in a particular place, you made your steel plates thicker there. But all those plates were pretty much vertical. Czech, French, and English designers worked from the same basic principles. It wasn’t as if there were any other way to go about things.
Except there was. Relying on the Russians’ inborn simplicity and fondness for the brute-force approach didn’t always pay. Some Soviet designer had had a better idea-a much better idea, as a matter of fact. If you sloped your panzer’s armor at, say, a forty-five degree angle, a lot of shells that would have penetrated vertical plate ricocheted away instead. And even the ones that did dig into the armor had to go through more of it to do damage: for shots coming in from most directions, sloped plate was effectively thicker than the same amount of vertical armor would have been.
Once you saw the stuff in action-once you watched your best shots bounce off a T-34 without hurting the metal monster-the idea seemed obvious. Everything seemed obvious after you banged into it nosefirst. But if it was so goddamn obvious, how come no German engineer in a clean white lab coat had twiddled with his slide rule till he came up with it first?
The Russians were Untermenschen, weren’t they? Hitler and Goebbels loudly insisted they were. If they were Untermenschen, though, and the swastika-following Aryans were Ubermenschen, why did the Red Army have better panzers? If the Ivans just had more panzers (which they also did), that wouldn’t have been so corrosive to Nazi ideology. The USSR was a hell of a big country. Having seen more of it than he’d ever wanted to, Theo knew that right down to his toes. And he also knew the T-34-and, to a lesser degree, the KV-1 as well-made every German panzer look like a model from the year before last.
He said as much to Adi. The Panzer III’s layout put them side by side at the front of the hull. Not only that, Theo trusted Adi further than he trusted… well, just about anybody else. You couldn’t count on people to keep quiet if security forces started hurting them. Short of that, Theo was sure Adi would never betray him. He was pretty sure Sergeant Witt wouldn’t, either, but only pretty sure. The new guys who fattened up the crew? He hadn’t made up his mind about them yet. It wasn’t as if there was any hurry.
Adi nodded. “They’re mighty good, all right. Not perfect, but mighty good.”
“Not perfect? Close enough!” Theo was stung into volubility, or as close to it as he came. “The gun? The armor? Der Herr Gott im Himmel, the armor! The diesel engine, so they don’t burn the way our beasts do?”
“Ja, ja.” Adi sounded like a man indulging a little boy. That infuriated Theo till the driver went on, “The commander’s up in the turret all by himself, though, the way Hermann was with the
Panzer II. He’s got to shoot the cannon, fire the machine gun, and command the panzer. And he’s got more panzer to command than Hermann did with the II.”
“Oh.” Theo thought that over. He didn’t need long. With a sheepish shrug, he admitted, “You’re right.”
Stoss shot him a sour look. “How am I supposed to have a proper argument with you when you go and say things like that?”
“Sorry,” Theo answered. “But I’m not going to lie.”
“Too bad. We could probably keep wasting time till sundown if you did,” Adi said. “Now we’ve got to find ourselves something else to talk about instead.” Irony glinted in his dark eyes. He could come out with something like that, confident Theo wouldn’t take him seriously. Plenty of soldiers would have.
They didn’t need to look for a new topic for very long. Off to the left, at the edge of an apple orchard, a Russian machine gun snarled to malignant life. The water-cooled Russian gun was much heavier and clumsier than a modern, air-cooled MG-34. It didn’t shoot as fast, either. Once in position, though, it made a more than adequate murder mill.
“Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt’s voice traveled the speaking tube from the turret to the front of the hull.
“Halting,” Adi answered as he hit the brakes. Witt traversed the turret-smoothly and quickly, with the hydraulics. In case of battle damage, he could also use a hand wheel and gearing to crank it around. It was too big and heavy for him to wrestle it into place with handles, as he could have in a Panzer II.
The cannon spoke twice. After a moment, though, the Russian machine gun spat more defiant death at the Germans. Back in the turret, Sergeant Witt swore. Theo would have, too. He presumed the panzer commander knew what he was aiming at and had hit it. If the machine-gun crew was still in business, it was operating out of a concrete emplacement.
Witt snapped, “Armor-piercing!” The cannon fired twice more. This time, Witt grunted in satisfaction. “Got the fuckers!” he said. “Some poor, sorry shithead lugging a flamethrower won’t have to try to fry them before they puncture him instead. Forward, Adi!”
“Forward,” the driver echoed, putting the Panzer III back in gear. In a low voice-too low for Witt or either of the new guys in the turret to hear-he went on, “Who knows what all else is lurking in the trees? Our foot soldiers will find out. Oh, won’t they just!”
That same thought had occurred to Theo. He wouldn’t have said it out loud, not even quietly to a friend he trusted. There lay one of the big differences between him and Adi Stoss. They had others, of course, but the fact that Adi would speak his mind seemed the most important. It did to Theo, anyhow.
To Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the woods southwest of Smolensk looked like, well, woods. They were less manicured than a carefully maintained German forest would have been. The Ivans had so much land, they had forests coming out of their ears. They had everything coming out of their ears, from iron and coal to wood to people. That was the only possible reason they were giving the Reich so much trouble.
From 3,000 meters overhead, Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t have been able to tell that the panzers in front of the woods belonged to the Wehrmacht if some of them hadn’t draped themselves in swastika flags as an identification symbol. Even seeing the banner that united Party and Reich didn’t leave him a hundred percent sure. The Reds sometimes captured those flags and used them as shields against the Luftwaffe.
Hans-Ulrich chuckled, there alone in the cockpit. A swastika flag might keep German planes from bombing Soviet panzers. But how many of the enemy panzer outfits that used it had suffered attacks from the Red Air Force? That kind of crap happened too often even to Germans who’d carefully briefed their air support about the ruse of war they were using. Given the Russians’ slipshod procedures, they were bound to go through it even more.