Jager stood up again without answering. Russians and Lizards-and SSEinsatzgruppe men-followed orders without thinking about them. TheWehrmacht trained its soldiers to show initiative in everything they did-and if that made them less respectful of their superiors than they would have been otherwise, well, you had to take the bad with the good.
They reached the crest of a low rise. “Halt,” Jager told the driver, and then relayed the command to the rest of the panzers in the battle group: anad hoc formation that essentially meant,all the armored vehicles we can scrape together for the moment. “We’ll deploy along this line. Hull down, everyone.”
When a polar bear prowled through ice and snow, it was the most deadly predator in its domain. Foxes and badgers and wolverines stepped aside; seals and reindeer fled for their lives. Jager wished-oh, how he wished! — the same held true for his Panther, and for the Panthers and Panzer IVs and Tigers with it.
Unfortunately, however, in straight-up combat it took anywhere from five to a couple of dozen German panzers to knock out one Lizard machine. That was why he had no intention of meeting the Lizards in straight-up combat if he could possibly help it. Strike from ambush, fall back, hit the Lizards again when they stormed forward to overwhelm the position you’d just evacuated, fall back again-that was how you hurt them.
He wished for a cigarette, or a cigar, or a pipe, or a dip of snuff. He’d never tasted snuff in his life. He just wanted tobacco. There were stories that people had killed themselves when they couldn’t get anything to smoke. He didn’t know if he believed those or not, but he felt the lack.
He had a little flask of schnapps. He took a nip now. It snarled its way down his gullet. It might have been aged half an hour before somebody poured it into a bottle. Then again, it might not have. After he drank, he felt warmer. The doctors said that was nonsense.To hell with the doctors, he thought.
What was that off in the distance? He squinted through swirling snow. No, it wasn’t a horse-drawn wagon: too big and too quick. And there came another behind it, and another. His stomach knotted around the schnapps. Lizard panzers, heading this way. Down into the turret again. He spoke two brief sentences, one to the gunner-“The Jews weren’t lying”-and one to the loader-“Armor-piercing.” He added one more sentence over the wireless for the benefit of the battle group: “Hold fire to within five hundred meters.”
He stuck head and shoulders out into the cold again, raising binoculars to his eyes for a better look. Not just Lizard panzers coming this way, but their personnel carriers, too. That was good news and bad news. The panzers could smash them, but if they disgorged their infantry before they were hit, they were very bad news. Lizard foot soldiers carried antipanzer rockets that madePanzerschrecks look like cheap toys by comparison.
The panzer troops he commanded had plenty of fire discipline,danken Gott dafur. They’d wait as he had ordered, let the Lizards get close and then hit them hard before dropping back to the next ridge line. They’d-
Maybe the crew of the Tiger a few hundred meters away hadn’t been paying attention to the wireless. Maybe their set was broken. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn about fire discipline. The long-barreled 88 roared with the leaders of the Lizard force still a kilometer and a half away.
“Dumbheaded pigdog!” Jager screamed. The Tiger scored a clean hit. One of the personnel carriers stopped dead, smoke spurting from it. Through the dying reverberations of the cannon shot, Jager heard the crew of the Tiger yelling like drunken idiots. The resemblance didn’t end there, either, he thought bitterly.
He ducked into the turret once more. Before he could speak, Gunther Grillparzer said it for him: “The Lizards know we’re here.”
“Ja.”Jager slapped the gunner on the shoulder. “Good luck. We’ll need it” He spoke to the driver over the intercom. “Listen for my orders, Johannes. We may have to get out of here in a hurry.”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst!”
They were agood crew, probably not quite so fine as the one he’d had in France-Klaus Meinecke had been a genius with a cannon-but damn good. He wondered how much that was going to help them. Exactly what he’d feared was happening. Instead of motoring blithely down the highway toward Breslau and presenting their flanks for close-range killing shots, the Lizard panzers were turning to face his position straight on. Neither a Tiger’s main armament nor a Panther’s could penetrate their glacis plates and turrets at point-blank range, let alone at fifteen hundred meters.
And the personnel carriers were pulling back even farther. He got on the all-panzers circuit: “They know we’re here now. Panzer IVs, concentrate on the carriers.Gott mit uns, we’ll come out of this all right.”Or some of us will, anyhow, he glossed mentally. Some of them wouldn’t.
The Panzer IVs along the line of the ridge opened up, not only with armor-piercing shells to wreck the personnel carriers but also with high-explosive rounds to deal with the Lizards who’d left before being hit. The order was cold-blooded calculation on Jager’s part. The IVs had the weakest cannons and the weakest armor of the machines in the battle group. Not only were they best suited for handling the carriers, they were also the panzers Jager could best afford to lose when the Lizards started shooting back.
He’d hoped the Lizard panzers would come charging up the slope toward his position, cannon blazing. The Russians had made that mistake time and again, and the Lizards more than once. That kind of rush would give his Panther and Tiger crews close-range shots and shots at the Lizards’ side armor, which their cannon could penetrate.
The Lizards were learning, though. Their panzer crews had been through combat, too, and had a notion of what worked. They didn’t need to charge; they could engage at long range. Even at fifteen hundred meters, a hit from one of their monster shells would blow-did blow-the turret right off a Panzer IV and send it blazing into the snow. Jager clenched his fists. With luck, the commander, gunner, and loader there never knew what hit them.
Nor were the armored personnel carriers helpless against panzers. Their light cannon wouldn’t penetrate turret armor, but some of them carried rockets on launch rails on the sides of their turrets. Like the ones the Lizard infantry used, those had no trouble cracking a panzer.
“Retreat!” Jager bawled on the all-hands frequency. “Make them come to us.” The Maybach in the Panther he personally commanded bellowed louder as it stopped idling and went into reverse.
“This’ll be interesting,” Grillparzer shouted up at Jager. “Will we be in our new position before they get up here where we are now and start blasting away at us?”
Interestingwasn’t the word Jager would have used, but it would do. The trouble was, the Lizard panzers were not only better armed and armored than the ones theWehrmacht had, they were faster, too. General Guderian hadn’t been joking when he said a panzer’s engine was as important a weapon as its gun.
A Tiger maybe half a kilometer off to the north of Jager took a hit just as it was about to reach the cover of pine woods. It brewed up spectacularly, with a smoke ring going out through the cupola as if the devil were enjoying a cigar, and then with the ammunition cooking off in a display of orange and red fireworks. Some of the smoke that boiled out of it came from the burning flesh of its five crewmen.
Grillparzer got a decent shot at one of the Lizard panzers, but its armor held the round out of the fighting compartment. A trail of fire appeared from out of a snowdrift, with no Lizard panzers nearby: the Lizard infantry had come up. The rocket hit a Panzer IV in the engine compartment, which burst into flames. Hatches popped open. Men ran for the trees. A couple of them made it. Machine-gun fire cut down the rest.