Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

“Fuck!” Adi Stoss’ mouth silently shaped the word. Theo nodded again. He couldn’t have put it better himself. Adi went on, “God help the poor Frontschweine out there.”

“ Ja .” He got a word out of Theo. Katyushas slaughtered foot soldiers, and often panicked the survivors. A direct hit on the turret from one could brew up a panzer, too. He wished that hadn’t crossed his mind.

He peered out through his vision slit. They were coming to Indian country-land the Ivans held. If the Katyushas had scattered German infantry, he needed to be extra alert to keep anybody in a khaki uniform from getting close to the panzer.

Sure enough, the Indians soon came out of the bushes-or rather, fired out of the cover they gave. That big flash had to come from an antipanzer rifle. The damned things were useless against modern armor: the loud clang as the round ricocheted from the Panzer IV’s front plate showed as much. The Russians kept issuing them anyway. They could punch holes in armored cars and halftracks, but anybody who thought he could knock out a real panzer with one was only fooling himself.

It was the last mistake this Red Army soldier was likely to make. Theo hosed down the bushes with several bursts from the bow machine gun. He thought he saw somebody thrashing in there. He might have shot a nice fellow, a guy who liked dogs and mushrooms and harmless hobbies like woodcarving. Give the nice guy an antipanzer rifle, though, and he turned into someone who was doing his best to make sure Theo didn’t get home to Breslau. Theo wasn’t about to let that happen. No second shot came as the panzer rattled on.

A much bigger shell burst fifty meters in front of the Panzer IV. Dirt and fragments banged off the German machine. “Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt yelled. Adi halted the beast. An AP round clanged into the breech. The big 75mm gun traversed a little to the right, then roared. The shell casing clattered down onto the steel floor of the fighting compartment.

Theo didn’t see a T-34 going up in smoke. That meant they’d missed. So did the way Witt shouted for another round. Theo’s balls tried to crawl up into his belly, as if that would do him any good. They were reloading and aiming again inside the Russian panzer, too. If they fired first, if they fired straight …

But they didn’t. A T-34’s commander also had to aim and fire the gun. The German crew, with a specialist gunner, was faster and more efficient. They got in the second shot, and they made it count. The distant T-34 began to burn. The enemy diesel didn’t explode into flames the way a German gasoline engine would have, but panzers had plenty of things besides fuel to catch fire.

“Forward!” Witt called.

Forward they went. The Wehrmacht wasn’t having everything its own way-it hardly ever did in Russia. The Panzer IV rumbled past the blazing carcass of an assault gun-a cannon mounted in a panzer chassis without a turret. The cannon had only a very limited traverse, so the assault gun had to swing itself toward a target. On the other hand, it boasted a low silhouette that made it hard to spot. And assault guns were cheaper and easier to manufacture than panzers.

Somebody had sure spotted this one. Theo hoped the guys in the gray coveralls were able to escape when their mount got hit, but he wouldn’t have bet on it. In case they had, he fired some machine-gun rounds more or less at random to make the Russians in the neighborhood keep their heads down.

A couple of rifle rounds pinging off the panzer near the vision slit told him he hadn’t made all the Ivans duck. Even a sniper wasn’t likely to hit a vision slit on a moving panzer, but anyone who’d been in the field awhile knew unlikely didn’t mean impossible.

“Panzer halt!” Witt ordered. Adi stamped on the brakes. The main armament thundered. Shouts from the turret told of another hit-and another kill. Yes, this machine could smash T-34s instead of just letting them know it was in the neighborhood.

But more and more Russian armor seemed to be in this neighborhood. The Ivans were guarding their flanks better than they often did. They must have realized what the Wehrmacht ’s counterstroke against their thrust was likely to look like, and made their own plans to keep it from working.

The Panzer IV rolled past more burnt-out vehicles, some bearing the red star, others the white-edged black German cross. Some of the twisted bodies in the fields and meadows wore khaki; just about as many were in Feldgrau .

Clang! … Boom! That was a Panzer IV taking a hit and brewing up not far away. Adi’s mouth twisted. “We just lost some guys we know,” he said. Theo nodded once more.

“Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt shouted again. Again, Kurt Poske slammed an AP round into the 75. Theo braced himself for another boom from the gun.

But he got a different kind of boom. Something slammed into the panzer. He felt as if he’d been clubbed.

“Get us out of here, Adi!” Witt said.

Adi tried. “Can’t, Sergeant,” he reported. “That one knocked off the right track.”

“ Scheisse! ” Witt said. “All right-everybody out! The next one hits us dead center. Good luck, friends!”

Theo remembered the first time he’d bailed out of a crippled panzer. He’d gained a wound badge and lost most of a finger on his left hand. Well, no help for it. The panzer commander was right. He’d end up with the next Russian shell in his lap.

He paused only to grab his Schmeisser-yes, he knew where it was. Then he opened his hatch and scrambled out of the Panzer IV as fast as he could. Bullets spanged off the armor plate. They struck sparks, but they didn’t strike him. Adi got out in one piece, too. They both scurried to the rear of the panzer, to put its bulk between them and, well, everything. The guys from the turret escaped through a hatch in its back.

“Welcome to the infantry!” Adi said with a sour grin. Theo cared nothing for the infantry. He didn’t feel like a foot soldier. He felt more like a snail suddenly torn from its nice, hard shell and transformed into a miserable, squishable slug. He also cared nothing for this attack, which was plainly bogging down. All he wanted was to live to see tomorrow.