Opening Moves

Knowing that the previous owners had just set it up, it seemed reasonable to expect a full magazine. He had no choice as the enemy force had already covered half the distance to the melee and no other options existed.

Flipping the weapon onto its front bipod, he determined to take the leading section first and to fire short bursts to reduce the chance of jamming. Something was wrong and the weapon just did not feel right. Ramsey spotted that the bipod was broken and couldn’t support the weapon so he lodged it across the chest of the dead woman and started firing.

The DP was a primitive looking weapon, with a large round magazine mounted on the top. However, it was extremely effective and reliable and, more importantly at this moment, easy and forgiving in its use.

The first burst flayed the leading enemy group as they ran at full tilt, dropping all but one. Similar success followed as first two and then four enemies were shot down. The Russians responded and Ramsey was immediately put off his aim, missing the next group completely.

Two bullets struck the woman’s corpse and splattered him with her blood, one more rammed into the ammunition pannier, jamming the weapon and hammering it back into his right shoulder. The Nordenham wound made itself known and Ramsey felt a wave of nausea wash over him.

The Russians, apparently thinking they had killed the British officer, accelerated forward into the fray, with just three men detaching themselves in Ramsey’s direction.

A Fallschirmjager Oberfeldwebel dropped all three with a single burst of his MP40 without realising he had saved Ramsey.

The Black Watch commander fell back towards his struggling men, seeking out a weapon so he could rejoin the fight. For want of anything else, he pulled the stick from his belt.

The noise of battle at the Rathaus grabbed his attention for a moment and he dropped into cover to observe as a wave of Russians fell back from the burning building, encouraged by the bayonets and bullets of the Welch counter-attack. It seemed that Llewellyn had summoned every single spare man to retake the focal point of the Russian assault.

Content that his rear was secure, Ramsey turned to his own predicament once more.

They were losing.

The Fallschirmjager and Black Watch were back on the edge of the defensive position with nowhere left to fall back to other than back into the Markt from whence they had come. The influx of men that Ramsey had tried to stop with the DP had made the difference after all.

Bullets pinged off the wrecked Volkswagen behind which Ramsey had taken cover, betraying the presence of more Soviets that had been cautiously moving into the corner of the Markt, directly opposite the Rathaus. Ramsey slid the stick back into his belt and picked up an Enfield rifle sat propped up, almost by design, against the vehicle. Checking it automatically, the weapon seemed fine; it was just empty.

Taking some ammo from the dead former owner, he prepared to intervene.

However, before he could commit himself the problem was dealt with in a more dramatic fashion, as two tanks from the Yeomanry’s headquarters rounded the Rathaus and took the new threat under fire.

One of the Sherman’s was the HQ close support tank, armed with a 105mm howitzer and its explosive shells did deadly work in short order, once again snuffing out a Soviet threat.

A shell struck the CS tank but did not penetrate, rather carrying away the nearside drive sprocket and smashing the track. The companion tank sought out the enemy and engaged what it thought was the right target, setting fire to a T-34 that had been knocked out the previous day.

The concealed operational T-34 fired again and penetrated the hull front of the CS Sherman just underneath the machine gunners position, cutting the luckless gunner in half before moving on to destroy the main gun loader as he was in the act of sliding a shell home.

Whatever happened in that split second turned the tank into an instant inferno, immolating the dead and living in equal measure. Within seconds, the vehicle was ‘brewing up’, a typically British understated term for the way some tanks burn like furnaces, firing flames in hard straight lines from openings and loudly whooshing like a boiling kettle.

Those in and around the Markt who had not seen the phenomenon before could not help but spare it a horrified gaze, the more so when the awful fate of the crew occurred to them.

Finally locating the enemy tank, the other British vehicle, a Firefly, put three shells into the now silent hulk. The 17-pdr’s sabot rounds had a high penetrative performance but lacked the punch of larger shells once inside. In this instance it hadn’t mattered, as the first shell had killed three of the crew, the last two succumbing to the second impact.

Much to the regret of the Firefly crew, the enemy tank did not burn as their friends had burned.