Free Casca 4: Panzer Soldier by Barry Sadler Page A

in?"
    The sound of the Kübelwagen exploding answered the question for him. Gus just smiled and said, "Well, are we going to hang around here all day? Let's get on into town. It's about suppertime and I spotted a field kitchen while there that bears looking into." The smoke from the burning Volkswagen jeep sent up one lonely black tendril behind them as their new home clanked on the dirt road to join the rest of their unit.
    In Prokhorovka, Heidemann said nothing as they rumbled in. As far as he was concerned, they were still riding a Panther. In the next few days, the front collapsed as divisions were moved out of the line for transfer to Italy. Gus moaned at the thought of others going to Rome. He was going to miss the food and the women. He cursed fate for leaving him behind.
    Every hour the Russian pressure became greater. The Germans fought a running battle as they withdrew, making Ivan pay for every step, but Ivan always seemed to have more men than they had bullets and by 15 July, they were in a defensive perimeter outside Kharkov. The city itself was burned out. Only a shell was left from the fighting that had taken place when the Germans captured it the last time.
    Teacher fell in love with the Tiger's 88 mm gun. It fired a twenty-two-pound shell at 2,657 feet per second, heavy enough and fast enough to cut the turret of a T-34 like butter. It was slower, but the increased armor gave them a feeling of security. They were positioned near a battery of 88 mm flak guns which could serve dual purpose as antitank. Between them they had accounted for fourteen enemy tanks in the last three days without getting a scratch on their paint, but Ivan was keeping the pressure on them, bringing up an ever increasing amount of artillery and "Stalin organs" firing those horrendous barrages night and day.
    General Voronezh massed two infantry armies, the 5th and 6th Guards, along with two tank armies packed into a front of no more than two miles, backed up with the support of 370 pieces of artillery per mile of front. The tanks had a depth of 100 to the mile. To the north, Koniev was to attack Belgorod and then move southwards and hit Kharkov and also keep army detachment Kempf from being able to lend any support to the defenders.
    The Germans were down to only 300,000 men in the pocket. The Soviets had them outmanned and out gunned and out tanked by at least three to one. Day after day, Langer's men faced wave after wave of Red soldiers throwing themselves into the fire of the German guns mindless of losses. They would come again and again and every day there were fewer familiar faces around them and no new ones to take their places. On 22 August, Field Marshal Manstein ordered the city evacuated counter to Hitler's orders. Langer and his crew withdrew through burning buildings and exploding supply dumps. The city was to be destroyed and nothing would be left behind for the Russians to use. The sounds of the explosions rumbled all that day and night as the city died for the second time. Units leapfrogging each other kept the Russian bear at bay while they withdrew, destroying everything.
    There was little left of the city of Kharkov except a smoldering mass of rubble. The flames could be seen for fifty miles in any direction. Kharkov had been the third largest city in Russia. Behind them the retreating Germans did leave one thing – 133,000 men had been lost. Kharkov, the old-timers knew, was the beginning of the end.
    Langer's Tiger moved with the rest of a long line of hundreds of armored vehicles and trucks, passing horse-drawn wagons filled with supplies and the wounded. They moved back. Heidemann, his tank and the two others were all that remained. The strain was on every face, thin, drawn and exhausted. The weariness reached into the bones and men marched while asleep, stumbling caricatures of their former glory – ragged and tired they marched with the steps of men old before their time, trying to keep the blind fear of panic