Tiger Battalion 507 by Helmut Schneider

Author:Helmut Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922387189
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

Soviet assault troops advancing in the summer of 1944.

water. I handed her a full ladle of it. Once she had finished it she fell at my feet again, cried, ‘Jesus Maria’ then returned to her earth bunker, apparently strengthened. As a 20-year-old I felt strangely moved by this episode.

In a meadow near the village street was a Kübelwagen flying a pennant from which I concluded that it had once served a senior officer as his wheels-perhaps it had belonged to the infantry general we had met recently. The noise of battle had died away completely. We all returned to the panzer to take up a security position but the Russians did not come again that day which pleased us. At dusk, however, there appeared a shadowy form going ‘put-put’ above us, the ‘Duty NCO’.

Hubert Hagenberger: Stabsfeldwebel Bethge’s Last Day

Reports came flooding in by the dozen. Air reconnaissance showed that 320 enemy tanks were moving out from Polonka. Our Tigers had to stop them. Since leaving the railway ramp at Baranovicze on 2 July, we had seen our army in flight and disintegration. All must have been assailed by panic, the fires stoked by Jabo and partisan attacks.

The weather was hot. I sat next to the hot gearbox where I could find some relief by squatting on the backrest, a foot on the gas pedal, my head through the hatch for fresh air. In this way I would drive through waving fields of corn. Our panzers also suffered from the heat: some failed to reach the area of operations due to engines overheating.

Now we were pushing forward in a fan formation towards a rounded hilltop behind which we assumed the enemy was lurking. Personally I was not greatly keen to follow the course of battle through my viewing slit: I thought of Ludwig Gsandner who had had his nose torn off when a round from an anti-tank rifle hit his viewing slit. If we were in the thick of it I would push myself back as far as possible while still having my foot on the gas pedal and able to accelerate the traverse of the turret when needed.

Now it rotated! Hits thundered against the armour making the interior paintwork flake. Bethge maintained an iron calm exuding confidence and security. Round after round we fired, the ventilator sucking out the powder smoke from the ejected casings. The clouds of dust which I could see over there suggested the presence of many enemy tanks, amongst them the heavy Josef Stalins and T-34s, which were not to be messed with: their 12.2 cm and long 7.62 cm guns respectively made them both the equal of the Tiger.

‘So, that was the fifth,’ Bethge said, his last words in life. Then we were hit as if by lightning. A metallic splitting noise followed the deafening explosions. Daylight streamed into the interior. Bethge had collapsed and fallen back into the turret. I resumed my position and tried to restart the engine which I had turned off but it would not respond.

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.