Opening Moves

Anyone else would have gone down immediately but not the Indian. Bluebear managed the ten yards or so to the Sergeant who had tripped over a dead comrade in his terror, claiming his last victim of the battle when he sunk his weapon into the man’s forehead.

The remaining guardsmen could be heard shouting warnings to their comrades in the Schloss as they ran for their lives, some splashing through the moat in their blind panic, not knowing that the Devil had collapsed from exhaustion and blood loss behind them.

A shaking armoured-infantry medic quickly bandaged the bloodied thigh wound, applying a tourniquet and squeezing the femoral artery virtually shut, saving Charley Bluebear’s life.

The Soviet reverse really did not matter in the greater run of things, as the shocked American troops decided to withdraw, led by a wide-eyed Sergeant who would need treatment for his traumatic experiences until the day he died.

After the battle, reports from the survivors who escaped the day’s slaughter were incredulously assessed. Conservative estimates suggested a total of twenty-two men personally slain by Tsali Sagonegi Yona of the Aniyunwiya Tribe, named as Cherokee by the Creek Indians, named as Corporal Charley Bluebear by the US Army, and known both jokingly and seriously as Moose by his friends. Except those who witnessed that day first hand, and those enemy who escaped the stables and lived, for whom, be they Armored-Infantry or Guards, he was forever named Death.

Despite the horrors in the Schloss, the balance seemed to perceptibly change in favour of the defenders and when weary Guards retook St Josef’s Church for the third time, it did not change hands again.

One older guardsman committed himself to the attack with a liberated bazooka, wrecking one Sherman that had strayed too close, but setting fire to religious trappings hanging behind him with the unexpected back flash from the weapon.

A teenage guardsman started to bayonet the American wounded who lay bleeding on the pews, standard fare for the German war of course. A bloodied Starshina stayed his hand before he could send a third American boy to his god. The young man shrugged and moved off to a firing position in a damaged window. Within half an hour he would lie dead with his victims, slain by a jagged lump of stone blasted from the wall by a tank shell.

As the fight for the village became more and more stagnant, the US Commander began to realise that he was nearly as far as he was going to go unless more infantry support was available. One battalion from the 63rd Infantry division had been freed up as an infantry reserve and he made a case for its deployment with his command. He got one company allocated under his orders and it was immediately sent forward from its reserve area, ten miles to the rear. Until it arrived he would have to make do with what he had.

Rottenbauer was a stalemate, both sides having fought themselves to a bloody draw but still killing although neither side was trying to expel the other anymore. The Russians were exhausted, having been fighting since midday on Monday.

The Americans were tired but, more than that, they were shocked at their full initiation in the rigours of modern infantry combat. The 12th’s soldiers thought they had acquired good experience against the German in 1945, even though they were already defeated and lacking in supplies.

By a coincidence, the 12th had captured Wurzburg in the first week of April 1945, some four months previously, sustaining a handful of casualties in the doing.

These Russians had first been committed to action in the hardest combat school ever known to man, in December 1942, on the Volga, at Stalingrad.

The 12th Armored’s experiences at Herrlisheim, the Colmar Pocket and subsequent romps through Southern Germany were as nothing compared to that Friday morning’s initiation ceremony in Rottenbauer, District of Würzburg.

Moreover, it was not yet complete.

It had taken over two hours to progress roughly two miles and casualties had mounted as enemy resistance stiffened, Soviet commanders drawing on years of combat experience gained at the hands of the world’s counter-attack specialists.

Ambulances and adapted jeeps from the 2nd/82nd Medical Battalion extracted the American wounded from the hellhole, unknowingly under the gaze of the observing Russian gunners who, faithful to their orders, remained silent behind their weapons.

The 179th’s Regimental Commander, Colonel T.N. Artem’yev, Hero of the Soviet Union, had stayed his hand thus far, all the time knowing his troopers in Rottenbauer were bleeding and dying in close combat with the armored infantry and tanks of this American Division. A very necessary sacrifice to persuade his enemy to orient themselves as he wanted, which his enemy had now obligingly done.

He did so with regret of course but it was necessary as he waited for the elements of the capitalists’ destruction to assemble on the battlefield, which they were very close to doing.