Schmidt, whose wife and three year old daughter were at home in Berlin, had no desire to be out carousing the local bars or chasing skirts. He’d had just one or two beers with his good friend and gunner, Milo Wisch, before heading back to the tent cluster that comprised their billets at the airfield. They might have found more comfortable quarters within the main airfield barracks, but most preferred to be close to their vehicles. There was also a vague disdain of the Luftwaffe that ran throughout the armoured units, due in no small part to those same occasional occurrences of ‘friendly fire’. For each of the few times that death or injury had been caused by a Stuka’s bombs or a fighter’s cannon, there’d also been a myriad of lesser incidents such as machine gun strafings that despite doing no actual harm to the tanks or their crews, nevertheless left the tankers unnerved and shaken.
Wisch, unattached but no big drinker or womaniser at the best of times, had decided to accompany his commander back to base, intending to seek solace in study, which he worked at during quiet moments when he wasn’t enjoying the camaraderie of the unit itself. In this fashion that evening, Schmidt, Wisch and a half-dozen of their fellow crewmen clustered about the warmth of that drum fire, quietly swapping stories and enjoying the extended period of inaction.
“Take our ‘wonderful’ Mark Threes, for example…” Schmidt continued pompously, intentionally refusing to use the Wehrmacht’s new designation of P-3 and throwing a hand back toward the dark shapes of the tanks from where they sat on their collection of deck chairs and ammunition crates. “Certainly the new, roomy turrets are an improvement over the early model ‘-Ones and ‘’-Twos…” he observed, “…but when are our esteemed leaders in the RWM going to start thinking things through properly?
“On paper our little gun there is the match of any enemy tank to be found on the battlefield, but what the boffins back in their workshops fail to mention is that, in the case of taking on Tommi Matildas at least, one has to get a lot closer than we’d like! All well and good for us — the ‘-Threes at least have enough sloped armour to give us some protection — but the poor bastards in the ‘Mark-Twos’ have more than likely been shot full of holes by enemy two-pounders by the time they get close enough to make a dent! It’s a simple equation…either give us more armour or give us a better gun…” he snorted in mildly drunken derision. “Better still, give us both and we’ll really make a mess of the enemy! We can only hope these new panzers we keep hearing rumours of have some battle experience behind them that includes a better armament!”
“We should count ourselves lucky we’re not stuck in P-1s, going around annoying the Tommis with our ‘doorknockers’,” one of the young gunners observed from the other side of the fire with some mirth, raising a few laughs and nods from the others. ‘Doorknocker’ was a nickname the Wehrmacht general soldiery had coined for the automatic gun arming the current P-1 light tank. While moderately effective in Poland, the P-1 tankers had discovered rather unpleasantly in their first engagements with the tanks of the British Expeditionary Force in France that the frontal armour of the Matilda II tank was utterly impervious to the so-called ‘armour-piercing’ shells of their 30mm cannon. The nickname was thus coined: the only purpose the ‘doorknocker’ seemed to serve in the eyes of the gun crews was to ‘knock on the door’ by shattering or bouncing off the enemies’ armour and alerting them to their presence.
“No worse than being one of those Frenchie Somuas!” A driver added, nodding. “Bloody things are riveted together or something ridiculous like that! I saw one near Sedan get hit on a ‘seam’ and the whole damned tank split wide open!”
“Yes, I saw that too…” another agreed beside him “…what a mess it was! Hit by a ‘Thirty Six’…” He referred to the lethal Flak-36 88mm anti-aircraft gun that was far more effective against tanks than against aircraft and had already developed a reputation of being able to deal with anything to be met with on the modern battlefield at incredible range.
“You’d split wide open too if you were hit by an Eight-Point-Eight!” The gunner observed in return, laughing as he pushed the man’s forage cap down over his eyes.
“A powder puff would split him wide open!” Another chimed in.
“Or a navy boy, no doubt!” Wisch added with good-natured cruelty, drawing the expected rude response from the good friend who’d become the butt of the joke.
All were still laughing loudly — even the slighted tank driver — as a motorcycle drew to a halt on the track beside their little encampment. The dispatch rider aboard dismounted from his Zundapp and jogged toward them, instantly picking out Schmidt as the ranking officer present by the way the tanker rose to meet him.
“Obersturmführer Schmidt, I presume?” The rider ventured hurriedly, coming to attention and saluting.
“That’s me, unteroffizier…” Schmidt nodded, all light-heartedness leaving him as he returned the salute and noted the other man’s serious expression. “What can I do for you?”
“Orders for you, sir…!” The rider began, handing over his authorisation papers for Schmidt to examine. “Local HQ requires the presence of an armoured vehicle immediately — if you could follow me, sir!”
“Any idea what it’s about, man?”
“Just that you’re required to mobilise one panzer and rendezvous with other units by the vehicle park outside the main gates. The officer in command will be able to fill you in further — a Captain Stahl is in charge.”
“Well, gentlemen; I guess that ruins our Saturday night…” Schmidt cast his eyes about the men with him, all now also on their feet. No complete single crew was present, but he could draw the appropriate crewmembers from those around him to operate one of the panzers. They wouldn’t work quite as efficiently as a practised and cohesive team might, but they weren’t expecting to go into battle in any case. “Milo, Hans and Karl with me: Karl… get ‘Three-Two-One’ warmed up…”
Richard Kransky hid behind of a clump of bushes by a low stone wall and watched as a small convoy rumbled past along the track toward the farmhouse at high speed. Among the supplies and equipment he carried on his back and about his person, he possessed both a scoped rifle (at that point slung on his back) and a cocked and loaded machine pistol in one hand. Neither of them could be of any use against armoured vehicles, and even if he did have enough ammunition to take on the squads that had arrived in a pair of canvas-covered trucks — which he didn’t — that wasn’t part of his mission requirement and would also be a very good way to get himself killed into the bargain.
Kransky had seen a lot of things in his thirty-seven years, many of them unpleasant. As a young man growing up in the urban sprawl of Trenton, New Jersey he’d been an idealistic soul. A cadetship with a small time newspaper had paved the way for a career in journalism; his own ability and sharp mind had taken that career further — to the point where he was free-lancing for several major US papers by the time he was twenty-eight. But somewhere along the line his career had gone astray. Even he couldn’t remember exactly where, but if there’d been a defining moment, it would’ve been sometime during the Japanese ‘annexation’ of Manchukuo in 1932.