Opening Moves

Banging out his orders with his fist on the map table and gesticulating wildly, the General got his officers moving.

There were only seven running tanks left in 2nd Btn after fierce exchanges with British tanks and anti-tank guns but they were ordered to go forward once more.

Ordering the 106th Pontoon Engineers to be ready, the Rifle Corps commander sent his men forward.

A number of things happened at once.

Ramsey reconstituted his reserve force at the rear of the Markt, bolstering the numbers with a stiffening of Fallschirmjager and a handful of Manchesters.

Llewellyn’s ‘A’ Company reserve force arrived at the Rathaus.

The Yeomanry’s D Sqdn lost its last tank to a mortar round which started an engine fire.

Adolphesbrucke dropped into the canal, victim of Soviet artillery fire.

Losing no time, Major Llewellyn organised a counter-attack that started to push back the Soviets on the ground floor of the Rathaus again.

Charging forward, the Welsh threw the Russians back all the way to the main lobby before they turned and held their ground.

Sub-machine guns and grenades did their deadly work and Llewellyn’s life was saved when one of his young fusiliers threw himself on a grenade that had landed at his side. The young man died, the officer lived. Llewellyn promised himself and the boy that he would record the brave act appropriately.

Another grenade landed close and was plucked up and thrown in an instant, returned from whence it had come to good effect, screams of pain marking its effectiveness.

Sensing the need to push hard again, Llewellyn shouted his troops forward and charged, dropping an enemy rifleman with a burst of Sten.

An enemy officer rose and fired his pistol, missing with his first two shots but hitting soft flesh with his third and fourth. Llewellyn, dropped to the ground by the impacts, pressed the trigger of his Sten and put a burst into the disfigured man.

Scelerov was thrown backwards by the impact of five bullets, losing his pistol as he hit the wall hard.

A group of fusiliers ran past him, intent on mischief further down the hallway.

Bleeding and in pain, Scelerov pulled himself onto his knees, extracted a fragmentation grenade and pulled the pin, intending to toss it into the middle of the fusiliers who had gone to ground fifteen yards away.

As he raised his arm a huge weight descended upon him, rugby tackling him and pinning him to the ground with the deadly charge still in his grip under his body.

In the last second of his life, Scelerov screamed not in fear but in anger, his revenge incomplete, and all those months of pain borne for nothing.

The grenade exploded eviscerating the Russian instantly.

Llewellyn received a fragment through his right wrist which damaged his tendons. The blast lifted him off the distorted body of Scelerov, throwing him to the left and stunning him as he hit his head on a lump of stone.

Carried forward by the momentum of the charge, the Welch continued to drive the Soviet engineers and riflemen before them, reclaiming most of the Rathaus.

Combined with the reclaiming of their old defensive positions by the Fallschirmjager, this created a shallow U-shaped area into which the 1st Rifle Corps was inadvertently committing its last force of note.

Without orders, the Hauptmann now commanding the Fallschirmjager secured the southernmost corner of his position and deployed two MG42’s on the right flank of the Soviet attack.

Simultaneously the Captain who found himself temporarily in charge in the Rathaus stiffened the southern wall defences and then organised a firing line in the Rathaus, looking across into the Markt. Three Vickers .303’s, two from RWF and one from the Manchesters bolstered the defence.

In the Markt itself were the Black Watch, with their own Vickers and three more from the Manchesters.

The T-34’s of 39th Guards Tank Brigade pushed forward, firing wildly as they advanced. One lucky shell reduced a Welch Vickers to scrap metal in short order.

The Russian tanks opened their formation as they moved into the southern edge of Markt and were brought under fire by C Sqdn of the Yeomanry and the last 71st 6-pdr at the end of Reesendamm.

^{Fig#31 – Hamburg – Finale}

^{At A – Location of hand to hand fighting by Perlmann’s Fallschirmjager and the Black Watch.}

^{At B – Point from which the Yeomanry’s two headquarters tanks engaged the Soviet tanks and where the CS tank was destroyed.}

^{At C – Deployment zone for T-34’s supporting the Markt attack.}

^{At D – II/259th’s probing attack that failed.}

^{At E – Adolphesbrücke struck by Soviet artillery and drops into the canal.}