Extract from ch.9, Mit Rommel bis zum Ende, by Hans von Luck
...even though the oil had frozen. I wished him good luck, and moved on. A few hundred metres further down the road I saw the General.
‘It is too bad,’ he was saying. Half a dozen snowmen listened to him; when they moved they revealed themselves as human. ‘See if you can work your way down to the railway station, find out what Ivan has got there.’
We greeted each other. ‘Any joy with the 14th?’ I asked. He shook his head.
‘Their vehicles are even worse than ours,’ he said. ‘Still. How many can you scrape up?’
‘Fifteen all told,’ I said. ‘All my half-tracks have gone kaput. Weber tells me he can get another armoured car working.’
‘So sixteen?’
‘Fifteen includes Weber’s baby.’ I sighed. ‘Normandy was a long time ago.’
Then he smiled, an incongruous thing to see in those circumstances. There we stood, not much more than twenty kilometres from the Kremlin, our beloved 7th Division many kilometres ahead of our flank support, with God knew how many Russians lurking around, and he smiled. When I think back on our years together, all our triumphs and heartbreaks, and how many times he could make things seem better just by his presence, small wonder it is that so many of us loved him.
‘We’ll just have to give it a try,’ he said. I had never doubted that he would make that decision. He always gave his utmost, and I was content to follow…
We ran into trouble before we reached the railway station. The enemy had two anti-tank guns backed by mortars and machine guns, well dug in and concealed, and we lost three vehicles straight away. The infantry could not get round to them because of ditches and mines - we had no means of clearing these under fire. Our assault pioneers had been shot up badly in the fight at Klin and we had received no replacements.
We skirmished fiercely for about an hour, taking and giving ground, when a runner came in from the flanking company on the east.
‘Sir, there’s hundreds of enemy advancing in our sector,’ he said, ‘they have armour. We counted three heavies and six light tanks.’ I swore. No matter how many Red units we smashed, they always had more to throw at us. And now our position was desperate. More reports of attacks came in over the radio, the enemy were making a substantial effort, and it was clearly directed against us. After all Ivan knew we were closer to Red Square than anyone else, they presumably wanted to make an example of us. I realised the entire division would probably have to retreat, and it might fall to my battalion to cover the retreat, with all that implied.
Rommel himself had come right forward to give as much impetus to the attack as he could, and now as we disengaged from the enemy at the railway station, we met his half-track. The sky had cleared briefly and we hoped for air cover, but instead we suffered a strafing attack by a pair of fighters - Sergeant Beck identified them as Hurricanes, though I saw nothing but a sudden shadow overhead and a hail of machine gun bullets. ‘Blasted Tommies follow us everywhere, sir,’ he said.
No-one was hurt in this attack, but it damaged one of the trucks which unfortunately now blocked the way. We lost a quarter of an hour dealing with the snarl-up, and when we got moving again, we found we had lost our race against time. Two shots hit our leading armoured car and wrecked it. Another struck the General’s own vehicle, just in front of my own, and it halted. Then with heavy heart we saw, approaching along a lane from our right, five enemy tanks followed by a horde of riflemen. We fired into them and a few fell, but the tanks came on and blocked the crossroads.
The General came back from his own vehicle and climbed onto mine. ‘It’s no good, Hans,’ he said. ‘We’ve got nothing here that can stop those things.’ He gestured at the tanks: as they came closer I could see they were English Matildas. In my despair I could think only one coherent thought, how Beck had identified such an essential feature of this war: that London had this uncanny ability to make its hostility to us effective even when no Tommies stood within thousands of kilometres…
A Russian Colonel, very tall and fair-haired, undoubtedly the descendant of one of those Germans who moved to Russia in the time of the Tsars, appeared before us and saluted. ‘A good fight, general,’ he said in good German. ‘My congratulations on your skill, you had reached our very last defences before the city. I regret this unfortunate necessity.’
The General saluted back. ‘Exemplary tactics on your part,’ he said. He offered his side-arm, which the colonel rejected. ‘So, colonel, what now?’
They marched us a couple of kilometres back to the railway station where by some miracle there was a train waiting. We boarded and it took us into the city, then we marched again, and after a short while a suspicion grew which turned into certainty. Our march took us through Red Square…
‘Well, Hans, I told you we’d get here,’ said the General. Despite the grimness of the day, the situation was so absurd that I had to laugh.