The Reckoning by Prit Buttar

Author:Prit Buttar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472837905
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Elements of SS-Das Reich were with First Panzer Army’s rearguard. As the movement to the west began, the SS troops pulled out of the town of Bar, 55 miles (89km) northeast of Kamanets-Podolski. There was little sense of a formal front line, with units from both sides often passing through villages and towns with no awareness of the presence of their enemies. Obersturmbannführer Hentschel, the division’s signals officer, described the withdrawal:

During the withdrawal of the vehicles, it fell to the signallers to try to bring the valuable radio vehicles out of Bar along the main road with the remaining combat vehicles.

By midnight the town of Bar was to be the front line and all vehicles were to be evacuated by then. At 0200 we were still wedged in with a load of other vehicles in the town. It was finally at dawn that there was some movement of the column. We were able to leave the town. More or less without leadership, trucks, tractors and above all horse-drawn vehicles tried to make their way to the southwest.

At 0800 all movement came to a halt. We could hear shots and an explosion. I went forward along the halted column on foot. The Russians had blocked the road. The enemy had taken up positions on an embankment, partly amongst some overturned vehicles. They fired on the road with anti-tank guns and mortars. An 8-ton tractor was ablaze, next to it a car. A Luftwaffe major, wearing a Knight’s Cross, lay dead next to them. The leading vehicles had all been abandoned. The drivers and crews had taken cover in some woodland next to the road. Many were already talking about surrender. But when they heard that all the remaining combat vehicles of the SS-Das Reich battlegroup were in the column, they cleared the road and our eight-wheeled radio vehicle, albeit armed with just a machine-gun, took the lead position. The signallers seized rifles and worked forward next to the road.

There was also a Pz.IV commanded by Hauptsturmführer Burmester in the battlegroup’s column. I deployed this tank to advance to the right of the road. A battery of infantry howitzers supported us with direct fire on the railway embankment. We were thus able to clear the way over the embankment.

Nevertheless, the junction of the road and the embankment remained under heavy fire. Our tank had only just crossed the railway embankment on the road when the vehicle column set off again in a panic. As a result there were numerous losses from Russian fire. We moved our vehicles forward in stages to a hill by a village. For the vehicles in front of us, it was a trap. We heard wild gunfire. There were no more vehicles to be seen on the road that led to the village. We wanted to pass through the village as it was already late afternoon, and we turned onto a relatively firm field road. But things grew worse. The first vehicle was soon bogged down. We tried to pull it free with the Pz.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.