Stumpff switched to the fine-laying gear and traversed the gun into line with the moving armored car, leading it like a bird. He turned the range wheel until the required marking was opposite a pointer at the top of the sight. By manipulating the traverse and elevation controls, Stumpff lay the sighting mark onto the target.
“Got it,” he cried above the panzer’s Maybach engine.
Stumpff pulled the trigger. The gun fired, filling the turret with a roar. A hydropneumatic buffer containing filling liquid, known as a Braun, absorbed the recoil.
Smoke hid the target from Stumpff, but the driver called out, “A hit.”
Wind moved the smoke. The corporal then could see what remained of the armored car, little more than three wheels and a twisted chassis. Its rear-mounted engine compartment had disappeared. Shards of metal lay about. Fire boiled from the remnants.
“You learn quickly not to gaze into the wreckage of a kill, or else you see black and twisted things you’ll never forget.”
The panzer’s loader opened the sliding door behind him and removed a round. He was wearing a glove to protect his hands against hot shell cases. He slid it into the breech and slammed it shut. The temperature in the turret rose as it filled with propellant gases from the breech and engine exhaust leaking into the fighting compartment. The panzer was buttoned up, and there was little ventilation.
“Sweat began rolling down my forehead,” Stumpff said. “Every few seconds I would have to wipe the headrest with an empty ammunition bag to prevent the eyepiece from fogging.”
The panzer rumbled forward. The commander yelled into his radio, coordinating movement with the other armored vehicles in the platoon. With every gear change, the turret sounded as if it had been hit with a hammer. Only by bellowing could the crew be heard above the tank’s engine. From below came the sound of the machine gun, an ear-rending racket. The tank’s steel plate acted as a sounding board, capturing and amplifying the sound and turning it inward. The radioman had seen something. He swore loudly.
“Smoke,” the commander yelled. His face was pressed against a green-tinted glass block on the cupola. He moved the shutter latch from its intermediary to the open position. “Shit, I can’t see anything.”
He spoke loudly into the tube to the driver, then said, “Werner’s blind, too.”
The commander twisted to another vision block in the cupola. “Goddamn it, I’m blind in all directions.” He turned to the loader. “You get yourself on your machine gun and cover me. I’m going up for a look.”
The commander reached for his binoculars hanging from a stud on the turret. He raised himself on his seat, unlatched the hatch, pushed it up, and swung it to one side. Smoke poured into the turret from above. He slowly stood.
Stumpff said, “His legs immediately buckled, and he collapsed back through the hatch onto the turret floor. His jaw had been shot off. Nothing below his nose but ooze and blood. A ragged hole opened to his throat. He screamed and screamed, clutching his head. Blood spread along the turret deck and seeped down onto the driver.
Stumpff was second in command. He roughly pushed the lieutenant to one side and climbed into his seat. He would now act as commander and loader. The loader crawled over the wounded man to the gunsight. Every soldier could do every one else’s job in the panzer.
Stumpff stuck the voice tube onto his mouth, “Werner, full ahead. Get us out of here.”
Over the intercom, the radioman said he had lost contact with number two tank, probably knocked out. The engine howled. The lieutenant wailed and burbled, his legs flailing at the gun breach.
The panzer jolted ahead and soon approached twenty miles an hour, then abruptly twisted right in a wild spin.
“We had thrown a tread,” Stumpff told me, spreading his arms. “Blown off by a mine, probably.”
More feared by tankmen than being cooked alive by an armor piercing shell is dismounting the tank in a firefight. When the tank is disabled, there is no choice, because antitank squads will quickly home in on it, wanting the crew as prize as well as the tank.
The corporal shouted at the loader, “Get out of here. Make for the tree line, and I’ll lay fire for you.”
The loader launched himself at the hatch, threw the hasps, stepped on the deflecting shield for support, and scrambled out, almost. He tumbled back, bounced off the breech, and slid onto the commander, who shrieked with renewed agony.
Stumpff recalled, “The loader’s head had disappeared, just blown off. A geyser of blood from his severed artery sprayed the inside of the tank, splashing across me and painting the turret walls.”
Stumpff thought the enemy might have crawled onto the turret, ready to drop a grenade. He yelled into the mouthpiece to abandon the tank, then grabbed the submachine gun. He fired it up through the open hatch.
“The engine blare, the Schmeisser racket, the commander sobbing and moaning and kicking. The fumes, the splashing blood, the heat, the sweat, my tears. The ejected submachine gun shells bouncing around, smoke funneling down the hatch into the turret. God, what a mess.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “Hell on earth.”
He looked at me scornfully. “It had been a picnic so far.”
Stumpff hesitated, then looked away from me, his eyes glistening. “I couldn’t leave the lieutenant there, and he was suffering a horrible, slow death. So I ended it for him with his service pistol.”
Just as the corporal gathered his feet under him to make his dash out the turret, a tracer shell, perhaps from a strafing Luftwaffe fighter trying to clear the turret for the panzer crew’s escape, skipped down through the hatch and ricocheted inside the turret.
“It was like a bell ringing, clang, clang, clang. And between each clang a piece of me was ripped off. Chunks of my thigh, my forearm, a crease across my stomach. Finally the bullet, still glowing, lodged itself in an ammunition bag. And, damn my luck, if it wasn’t the flare bag.”
A signal flare instantly ignited, filling the turret with blinding light and ferocious heat. Stumpff fell back against the commander’s seat, then slipped on the bloody turret deck. He pitched forward into the gun breach, breaking his jaw and his nose. The flare filled the turret, setting Stumpff’s uniform and his hair on fire and blasting his eyebrows from his face.
“I felt like I was inside a burning coal, nothing but red-white light, no escaping, no retreating from it. With every breath I seared my thoat.”
Stumpff lashed out with his legs, fighting upward like a drowning man. His head bounced against the extractor fan housing, then against the cupola ring. He pushed off against the commander’s chair.
“I squirted through the hatch. I must have looked like a flare myself, all on fire. I slid off the turret to the engine deck, then fell to the pasture. I rolled and rolled to smother the fire, then I crawled away from my panzer, thinking it might blow. It didn’t, but I never found out what happened to the driver and radioman.”
I tried again. “Hell on earth.”
“I’m not done,” he said testily. “So there I am in that pasture. Burned to a blackened stump. Wounded and bleeding in four or five places from the tracer. My jaw and nose broken. But the worst was to come, because I lay in that field for two days before the medics could get to me. Of all my terror and pain, the worst was my thirst during those days. I almost died for lack of water and a kind word.”
During the Battle of Haywards Heath, while we quickly dismantled HQ at Bilswell Manor because the panzer thrust was closing in from the east, General Clay explained to me the Wehrmacht’s moves. Or he might have been talking to himself. “A panzer regiment acts as the spearhead, rushing ahead on a narrow front, sometimes only three thousand yards wide. The tanks’ guns are concentrated in a wedge, called a keil. Each wave has been assigned destruction of some defense. The panzers punch through by their sheer weight. Then come the motorized rifle regiments to take out bypassed points of resistance and hold captured ground. Next come the antitank units to defend against counterattack. Then come the mechanized artillery batteries to support the tanks with fire against heavily defended points slowing the advance. It’s all according to the book. I read the book.”