David Robbins - Last Citadel

The captain talked on, breezy.

‘Look at all this back here. Exhaust covers, air filters, it’s a trap for shot. And this eighty-eight millimeter gun you’re so in love with. That’s the reason why this damn tank is so gigantic, just to carry it. There’s a new, long-barreled seventy-five on the Panthers that will do the trick. But Hitler wanted the eighty-eights, and so here they are. Do you know what the mileage for a Tiger is?’

Luis shook his head. The captain was showing off.

‘Point eight miles per U.S. gallon on roads. Less than half a mile per gallon cross-country. With a one-hundred-and-forty-two-gallon fuel capacity, that’s four to five hours of battle running.’

‘That’s not good.’

‘No,’ the captain laughed, ‘it’s not good.’

The man reached out to the idling Tiger and smacked it hard.

‘But so far, it’s been good enough.’ He thrust the hand at Luis. ‘Captain Erich Thoma. 1st SS Panzergrenadier Division. Pleased to meet you, Captain la Daga . Major Grimm sends his regards.’

The captain’s clasp was warm and enveloping. With the mention of his nickname, the partisan’s life beat harder in his bony mitt, there inside the handshake between the two SS captains,

‘Captain Luis Ruiz de Vega.’

‘ Si ,’ Thoma said. ‘ Gracias por truer mis Tigres .’ Thank you for bringing my Tigers.

‘You were in Spain?’

‘Yes,’ Thoma said. He cast his eyes over Belgorod’s fading skyline. ‘I wish we were there now. I much preferred fighting in Spain. Beautiful country.’

Thoma left the handshake and tapped Luis in the arm with the gibe. The gesture was manly, between warriors, with no concession or notice of Luis’s painful thinness. Thoma put his hand between Luis’s shoulder blades.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Major Grimm wants to see you.’

Thoma and the rest of the cars ran without headlights to get to their posts before the steppe darkness grew total. Luis rode beside Thoma in the front seat of a Mercedes convertible staff car. Belgorod was a small German city at this point, almost no Russians were visible on the streets and sidewalks. Soldiers manned sandbagged positions at every corner. Not a single window let light seep into the gathering dusk, all were shaded by blackout curtains. Horse-drawn carts clip-clopped through the town headed north to the lines. There was something medieval about the sight of soldiers leading animals on tethers over cobblestones.

Thoma drove and talked about his tanks, acknowledging Luis’s background in them, updating him on changes in the armored divisions during the time he’d been in the hospital. The old Mark III light tanks were too small to be of much good anymore. The turret ring wouldn’t take any of the bigger guns. They were obsolete. Their production had been halted in June of this year. Even so, Germany still had over four hundred Mark IIIs around Kursk, in infantry-support roles. The 50 mm gun could still kill a T-34 at five hundred meters, but, Thoma opined, most Mark IIIs would be dead before they could get that close.

The workhorse of the Wehrmacht remained the Mark IV medium tank, with 850 of them around the Kursk salient. The design had been upgunned since Luis had commanded his Mark IV outside Leningrad. The tank now featured a long 75 mm cannon with a greater muzzle speed than the T-34. The Mark IV, in Thoma’s estimation, had superior cannon and fire controls, and a better three-man turret. The Soviets possessed superb mobility and armor, but held only a crew of four, putting a lot of pressure on the commander/gunner.

‘Both can wipe the other out at standard battle ranges. There’s no real technical advantage between the T-34 and the Mark IV. So the dead and the living, you see, Captain la Daga , will be determined by tactics and training.’

The Tigers, Thoma declared, were not designed to be offensive weapons. They were too slow for that, they had eight forward gears and four reverse, with an average overland speed of thirteen miles per hour. The range of the Tiger’s main gun was too long to be used solely in tight fighting, where the advantages of distance were dismissed. No, the heavy Tigers were most lethal when used in defense. But Kursk was not to be a defensive battle. The tank that was ordained to become Germany’s standard offensive weapon was the new Mark V Panther. Luis had never seen one of the Panthers, though he’d heard much about them. Sloped armor, medium weight, a long-barreled 75 mm main gun that could penetrate any Soviet armor, as nimble as the T-34s, the Panther was reputed to be the master of the Russian tank in every category.

‘But,’ Thoma said, wagging his long fingers again, ‘the Panther’s going through some teething pains. The transmissions and engines don’t seem ready, the things blow up on their own. Hitler hurried them into production to get them ready for their debut here. Two hundred were delivered to 4th Panzer Army but we don’t have any of them in the SS Panzer Corps. They’re on our left flank with the 10th Panzer Brigade. To tell you the truth, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the Panthers in Kursk as anything more than smoke bombs.’

‘That leaves your Tigers,’ Luis said.

‘Yes. That does, doesn’t it?’ Thoma smiled. ‘Poor out-of-place monsters. They’ll just have to make do.’

The car pulled up in front of a four-story brick building rising beneath a tarnished gilt dome. Thoma and Luis slammed their car doors to the convertible, they were two young men with long strides in black uniforms, gliding alongside each other up the steps. Inside, they dodged men with sheaves of paper in the hall, other young, shining soldiers in the service of the generals directing the coming battle from these rooms. The eyes of those men hurrying by sometimes snagged on Luis, so odd-looking was he beside the hale Thoma, and he began his accustomed descent into contempt for those without scars. Thoma saw this – how could Luis hide it? – and slipped his arm under Luis’s elbow.

‘They wouldn’t know which end of a gun to fire,’ the captain said without lowering his voice.

Thoma laughed, he and his Iron Cross, and Luis felt his own discomfort ease. Thoma ushered him into a high-ceilinged room off the main corridor. Under an impressive muraled ceiling lay a vast map of the Kursk region, resting on the tops of a half-dozen tables shoved together. Positioned all over the map were painted wooden effigies, like game pieces on a wonderfully large board. There were carved tanks and artillery guns, squares and circles with flags standing over them denoting armed units, colored black or red, German or Russian. Two young orderlies waited along the rim of the table with long poles to push the pieces about; it was shuffleboard with machines and lives as pucks.

Thoma led Luis to the edge of the carpet and halted, heels together. Luis copied this posture of attention, making his boots click. On the far side of the room stood Major Grimm speaking with an SS colonel. The fat major looked better now in a fresh shirt, he’d had a bath and a shave.

‘Captain Thoma. Good, good! Come in.’

The two young captains advanced around the long perimeter of the table. Walking beside the map, Luis glanced down to it. The map held far more red figurines than black.

‘Colonel,’ Major Grimm said, ‘this is the young man I told you about. Captain de Vega, this is Colonel Breit. He’s the intelligence officer with your Leibstandarte Division.’

To Luis’s eye, Colonel Breit was the epitome of a general staff officer. The man was slender, with a close-cropped head of dark hair, flecked with white. The colonel was pale and seemed uncomfortable with speech, the opposite of the energetic and verbose Thoma. Breit wore a War Merit Cross with swords on his breast. This was not a battle citation but the sort of medal won by administrators, for non-combat contributions to the war effort. The only tank this one has ever handled, Luis considered, is on these maps. Breit welcomed Luis with a handshake and a curt, tight-lipped smile. Nothing on the man’s face betrayed any thought about Luis’s appearance. He’s the brainy sort, Luis decided. He doesn’t care about anything that’s not on these tables.