Wheels of Terror

Book 0: Sven Hassel War Classics

by Sven Hassel

Genres: War & Military

Synopsis

This is a book of horrors, and should be left alone by those prone to nightmares. Sven Hassel's descriptions of the atrocities committed by both sides are the most horrible indictments of war I have ever read ... A great war novel!' Alan Silitoe

Stationed on the Russian Front and now equipped with armoured vehicles, Sven Hassel and his comrades from the 27th Penal Regiment fight on remorselessly...

All of them should be dead: life expectancy on the Russian Front is measured in weeks. But Sven, Porta, Tiny and The Legionnaire fight to the end, not for Germany, not for Hitler, but for survival.

WHEELS OF TERROR is a sobering depiction of war's brutalities, and the violence and inhumanity that the history books leave out.

Read by Rupert Degas

Release date: December 23, 2010

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

The air-raid screams, whistles, thunders. Fire falls from the sky. Mothers cry to God and throw themselves over their children to protect them from the rain of fire falling on the asphalt.

Soldiers, trained in murder and hate, soldiers carrying their arms, are to be the people’s protectors.

When the enemy bombers are silent, the rifles of these protectors speak.

Ordinary decent people, whose last energy has burnt away in panic-stricken terror, are being murdered by the soldiers of their own country.

What is the meaning of it all?

Dictatorship, my friend.

The barracks were silent and dark, wrapped in the dark velvet of autumn. Only the sharp heel-taps of the sentries’ hob-nailed boots could be heard as they walked their tedious watch on the cemented path in front of the gates and along the sides of the barrack buildings.

In Room 27 we sat and played cards, Skat, of course.

‘Twenty-four,’ Stege called.

‘You bloody whore,’ Porta rhymed, grinning ferociously. ‘That’s where I came in.’

‘Twenty-nine,’ Möller bid quietly.

‘Sod you, you Schleswig spudpeeler,’ Porta said.

‘Forty,’ came calmly from The Old Un. ‘Who can beat that? Laughing on the other side of your face now, eh, Skinny?’

‘Don’t be too bloody sure. Even playing with sharpers like you, you old …’ Porta leered at The Old Un. ‘I’ll see you off. Forty-six!’

Bauer started to laugh loudly:

‘I’ll tell you something, old Porta. Here’s forty-eight, and if you can beat that—’

‘Not too much talk, my lamb. Quite a few of you died from that. But if you want to play with experienced people, this is how it is done.’ Porta looked very smug. ‘Forty-nine!’

At that moment loud whistling came from the corridors:

‘Alert, alert, air-raid warning!’

And then the sirens cut in with their rising and falling banshee wails. Bursting with malice and cursing fluently, Porta flung down his cards.

‘To hell with these bloody Tommies – coming and mucking up the best hand I’ve had for years!’

To a recruit, who stood looking confused and fumbling with his gear, he roared:

‘Alert, my pretty, air-raid warning! Down to the shelters with you, double-quick, off!’

The recruits stood open-mouthed listening to his Berliner guttersnipe bellowings.

‘Is it really a raid?’ asked one of the recruits nervously.

‘Of course it’s a bloody raid. You don’t imagine the Tommies have come to invite us to a ball at Buckingham Palace, do you? And that’s not the worst of it! Now my lovely game of Skat goes to hell! Just to think what a mess a damned war can make of quiet, honest people’s lives …’

Wild confusion had broken out. Everyone was tumbling round each other. Lockers were torn open. Heavy boots thundered through the long corridors of the vast block of barracks and down the stairs to the assembly points. Those who had not yet properly learned how to cope with their new hobnailed boots fell flat on the slippery tiled floors. Those who came behind waded over the novices, who had all more or less gone wild with panic when they heard the sirens. Most of them had enough experience to know that in a moment the bombs would come screaming through the pitch-black night.

‘Number four platoon – over here.’ The Old Un’s quiet voice sounded curiously penetrating through the dark so dense it could nearly be cut. In the sky we could hear the heavy bombers winging towards their target. And now the flak began to bark hollowly from here and there about the city. Suddenly a light flared, a sharp white light which hung in the sky like a beautifully lit Christmas tree. The first target-light. In a minute the bombs would be drumming down to earth.

‘Number three to the shelters,’ sounded RSM Edel’s deep bass voice.

At once the company’s two hundred men split up and rushed in all directions to slit-trenches or even just heaps of soil. We soldiers were afraid of what were called air-raid shelters. We preferred the open trenches to the cellars, which we regarded as rat-traps.

And then hell loosed itself. Round us the enormous explosions shrieked and thundered. The bombs fell like a blanket over the city. In a moment everything was lit by the blood-red light from the great sea of flames. Crouching in our trenches, it looked as though the whole world was disintegrating in front of our eyes.

For miles around, the explosive and incendiary bombs illumined the condemned city. No words could ever describe that horror. The phosphorus of the incendiaries spurted like fountains in the air and spread an inferno. Asphalt, stone, people, trees, even glass went up in flames. Then the high explosives followed, spreading the inferno even wider. The fire was not the white fire of a furnace but red, like blood.

New, blinding Christmas trees appeared in the sky, giving the signal to attack. Bombs and air-torpedoes shrieked down on the city. Like an animal marked for slaughter it lay there, and like lice people searched for wrinkles and crannies to hide in. They were finished, torn to shreds, suffocated, burned, broken, minced. Yet many, just for a moment, made desperate attempts to save their lives. The lives to which they clung despite war, hunger, loss and political terror.

The Firling Flak at the barracks stuttered and barked against the invisible bombers. Orders had demanded that it should be fired. Fine! The gunners fired, but one thing we knew: not one of the great bombers would be damaged by the ridiculous Firling Flak.

Somewhere someone cried so loudly that the voice penetrated the din. The hysterical and sobbing voice cried for the ambulance squad. Two bombs had hit a single barracks-block.

‘God help us,’ murmured Pluto who lay on his back in the slit-trench with his steel helmet pushed over his forehead. ‘I only hope they’ve hit some of the Nazi high brass down there.’

‘Funny how a city can burn,’ added Möller as he lifted himself up and looked out towards the glowing sea of fire. ‘What is it that burns so?’

‘Fat women, thin women, beer-blown men, thin men, bad children, nice children, beautiful girls, everything mixed up,’ said Stege and wiped the sweat off his brow.

‘Well, well, children, you’ll soon find out – when we go down and help with the clearing up,’ The Old Un said evenly, and lit his old pipe with its period-piece lid. ‘I’d rather see something else. I don’t like seeing half or whole-charred children.’

‘That’s too bad,’ said Stege. ‘There’s going to be no difference between us and a mob of slaughterhouse workers when we get going down there.’

‘Isn’t that what we are?’ Porta asked, laughing evilly. ‘What is this bloody army we have the honour of belonging to, but just a huge butchery? Still, never mind. At least we’ll have a trade to fall back on, eh?’

He stood up and bowed sardonically to the whole gang of us as we lay there with our backs pressed against the sides of the trench:

‘Joseph Porta, Corporal by the grace of God, butcher in Adolf’s army, habitual criminal and death candidate, corpse-carrier and incendiary! Your servant, gentlemen!’

At that moment a new Christmas tree flamed up near us, and he dropped quickly back into the trench.

He added, sighing: ‘Another party is off to hell. Amen!’

For three solid hours, without a minute’s peace, the explosives drummed down from the dark velvet sky. The phosphorus containers poured on the streets and houses in close-knit showers, in one impenetrable hailstorm of death and destruction.

The flak had long since been silenced. Our night fighters were up there, but the big bombers were not bothered by their smaller brothers-in-hell. The huge steam-roller of fire crushed the city from north to south, from east to west. The railway station was a roaring ruin of flames with red-hot carriages and engines in one molten heap, as if it had been ground by a giant amusing himself. Hospitals and nursing-homes collapsed in a holocaust of mortar and fire. Here the many beds provided excellent opportunities for the phosphorus to sport. Most of the patients were in the cellars, but there were many left in the wards for the flames to devour. Screaming, amputated cases struggled to get up and away from the flames which licked hot and hungry through doors and windows. The long corridors provided chimneys with a splendid draught. Fireproof walls burst like glass under the devastating pressure of explosives. People got up, only to fall gasping to the ground, suffocated by the heat. The stench of singed flesh and fat floated across to us in our trenches. Between the detonations the last half-strangled screams reached us.

‘Children, children,’ gasped The Old Un, ‘this is bad, this is. Any left alive will be round the bend after this bloody lot. Give me the front-line any time. There women and children don’t get roasted and skinned. The damned swine who invented air-raids should have a taste of this.’

‘We’ll burn the fat off Hermann’s backside when we have our revolution,’ hissed Porta. ‘Where’s the fat slug now, I wonder?’

At last it looked like ending. Piercing whistles and words of command rang out through the barracks, which were still illuminated by the ocean of flames. In single file we doubled to our stations.

Porta leaped wildly into a Krupp diesel lorry. The engine whined, and without waiting for orders he swung the huge vehicle out and roared off. We clung on as best we could. A nineteen-year-old lieutenant shouted something, and ran at the roaring vehicle. A couple of big hands heaved him in.

‘Who in hell’s name is driving this!’ he gasped, but nobody answered him. We had enough to do trying to hang on to the madly bucking truck which Porta with a deft hand steered between the deep craters in the road. We thundered through the burning streets where tramcars and other vehicles lay broken between mortar rubble and fallen lamp-posts. But Porta didn’t take a fraction off his speed. At one point, he swung in on clear pavement, knocking down small trees like matchsticks. But near Erichsstrasse we had to stop. A couple of air-torpedoes had struck, and a building lay like a wall across the street. Even a bulldozer would have had to call a halt.

We leaped off the truck and with pickaxes, axes and shovels, worked our way through the rubble. Lieutenant Harder tried his best to gather us under his command, but nobody paid any attention. The Old Un took charge. Shrugging his shoulders, the young officer grabbed a pickaxe and followed the file behind. The Old Un, the experienced frontline soldier. Like all of us, he had changed his weapons for a tool which we handled with as much adroitness as when we used flame-throwers and machine-pistols in battle: the entrenching-spade.

Through the raw, nauseating smoke people bandaged with dirty rags came towards us. Grossly swollen burns spoke their own clear language. Here were women, children, men, old and young, whose faces terror had turned to stone. Madness shone out of their eyes. Most of them had had their hair singed off, so one could barely distinguish one sex from the other. Many had wrapped themselves in wet sacks and rags as a protection against the flames. One woman in her madness shouted at us:

‘Haven’t you had enough! Haven’t you dragged out this war long enough! My children are burnt to death. My husband is lost. May you burn, too, you damned soldiers!’

An old man took her by the shoulder and drew her away:

‘Now, now Helga, take it easy. You might make things even worse for us, you know …’

She tore herself loose and leaped at Pluto with fingers spread like a tiger’s claws, but the big docker shook her off as if she had been a small child. She banged her head against the hot asphalt, burst into uncontrolled screams. She and the old man were lost to us as we worked our way forward to the gigantic cliff of ruins. Surrounded by flames it towered in front of us.

A policeman without his helmet and with his uniform nearly burned away stopped us and stammered:

‘The Children’s Home, the Children’s Home, the Children’s Home …’

‘What are you drooling about?’ The Old Un snarled as the policeman dragged at him and kept on stuttering:

‘The Children’s Home, the Children’s Home!’

Quickly Porta stepped forward and slammed his iron fist two or three times in the policeman’s face. This treatment had often produced striking results at the front when we had used it on somebody with shell-shock. It also helped a little now. With eyes nearly popping out of his head with terror the policeman gabbled a sort of explanation, words tumbling out.

‘Save the children! They’re trapped inside. The whole lot is going up like matchwood!’

‘Stuff it, you Schupo swine!’ bellowed Porta grabbing the man by the shoulders and shaking him like a mat. ‘Get your fat copper’s carcase moving to the Children’s Home and bloody quick! In front of us now – los mensch! What are you waiting for? I’m no captain – just Corporal Joseph Porta by the grace of God – but I expect crap like you to take my orders!’

The policeman, who looked as if he wanted to run for it, started to dart about confusedly, but Lieutenant Harder clutched him: ‘Didn’t you hear? Get going! Show us the way, and don’t dawdle or you’ll be shot!’

Simultaneously he swung his Mauser under the nose of the half-crazed policeman. His lips were trembling violently and his cheeks were streaked with tears. Normally, as an old man he would have been pensioned off but for the war.

Pluto, his giant’s body towering over him, gave him a brutal shove and growled: ‘Shut up and march, Grandad.’

The policeman, half-running, staggered along in front through collapsed shells of streets, where flames danced heavenwards. Women, children and men lay pressed fast to the ground. Some were dead, others had been struck dumb, and the cries of some curdled our blood.

Where a few hours before there had been a street corner, a little boy came running to us, shouting and dribbling in his fright. ‘They are all trapped in the cellar. Help me get Mummy and Daddy out! He’s a soldier like you. He was just home on leave. Lieschen has lost her arm. Henrik has burned up.’

We stopped for a moment. Möller petted the boy’s head: ‘We’ll soon be back!’

We had reached a mountain of fallen rubble. It was impossible for us to go on. As we turned to ask the policeman to lead us another way there were enormous explosions close by. Like lightning we dived for shelter. Experience of the front line helps.

‘What the hell, is Tommy back again?’ hissed Porta.

Still more metallic thunderclaps, missiles, stones and earth showered over us. When fragments hit our steel helmets they rang with a curious high-pitched scream. But the new onslaught could do little more than interrupt us. Soon it ceased.

‘They’re dropping them blind now,’ said The Old Un briefly and stood up.

We pressed on towards our target, the policeman in front. He led us through a cellar. We smashed holes in the wall with our pickaxes to reach what looked like the remains of a big garden. Its trees had toppled and burnt and layers of rubble and twisted iron, the remnants of a building, were still burning furiously.

The policeman pointed and muttered:

‘The children are underneath that lot …’

‘God, what a pasting it’s got,’ Stege said. ‘And what a hell of a stink! They must have had phosphor-bombs on top of the incendiaries.’

The Old Un looked quickly round, taking stock, and began to attack vigorously something that looked like cellar steps.

With feverish anxiousness we hacked, shovelled and dug through the rubble, but for every shovelful we shifted a shovelful of debris poured down. Soon we had to stop to draw breath. Möller said that the most sensible thing would be to make contact with those in the cellar, if any were still alive.

The policeman was sitting with dead eyes rocking himself to and fro.

‘Listen, Schupo! Is this the right place,’ cried Porta, ‘or are you fooling us? And, damn you, stop playing rocking-horse! Give us some help. What do you think you are paid for?’

‘Leave him be. He can’t help it,’ Lieutenant Harder said wearily. ‘This is a Children’s Home. Or it has been. It says so on that notice-board over there.’

Following Möller’s advice, we knocked at what had been a doorpost and after what seemed eternity we got an answer, very faintly as it came through to us: knock! knock! knock! Hitting the post again with a hammer, we listened with our ear to it. There was no doubt: knock! knock! knock! We worked like madmen with our pickaxes and crowbars to smash through to the cellar. Sweat made furrows on smoke-blackened faces. Skin was torn off hands. Nails broke and palms blistered as we man-handled the hot, sharp mortar and brick.

Pluto swung round at the policeman who was rocking on his haunches as he mumbled incomprehensibly.

‘Come here, you stupid old flatfoot. Help us with this shaft,’ he shouted.

As there was no response the giant crossed to Schupo, grabbed him and carried him without effort to the shaft, where we worked on indifferently. The old man bumped down to us. When he got to his feet, somebody thrust a spade into his hand and said:

‘Get weaving, chum!’

He started digging, and as the work brought him to his senses we didn’t worry any more about him. The Old Un was the first to break through. It was only a tiny crack, but through it we could just see a child’s hand scratching desperately at the cemented wall.

The Old Un spoke soothingly into the darkness. But instantly a chorus of children’s screams drowned him. It was impossible to calm them. The hole was now bigger, and the little hand was thrust through, but we had to hit it in order to make it withdraw. As we got one hand to shrink away another fought to take its place.

Stege turned and burst out: ‘It drives me mad! We’ll break their hands if we have a real bash at this.’

From the other side of the wall we heard a woman’s voice screaming for air, and another shouting: ‘Water, water, for God’s sake bring water!’

The Old Un still on his knees, spoke soothingly to them. His patience was enormous. Without him we would all have thrown down our tools and run away with our fingers jabbed in our ears to stifle the mad voices.

Dawn hardly penetrated the thick suffocating carpet of smoke over the burning city. We worked with gasmasks but were nearly choked. Our voices sounded hollow and far away.

We had managed to make a new hole. Desperately we tried to quieten the unhappy people in the collapsed cellar. The atmosphere of horror during the raid can be imagined, but only those who have experienced bombs know that they are not the worst. The human spirit’s reaction to them is worst of all.

‘Our Father, who art in Heaven,’ a trembling voice rose. The pickaxes and shovels clattered on. ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ – a shrieking bang, splashing, and fire poured everywhere. New, ear-splitting bangs. Another raid? Another stray drop? No, incendiaries!

We pressed our bodies hard against the very foundations of what had once been the Children’s Home.

‘Thine is the Kingdom …’

‘By God, it isn’t,’ Porta’s excited voice answered. ‘It belongs to Adolf – that swine!’

‘Help, O God in Heaven, help us and our children,’ cried a praying woman in the cellar. A child sobbed: ‘Mummy, Mummy, what are they doing? I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.’

‘Oh, God, get us out,’ another woman cried hysterically, as a white, well-groomed hand clawed at the hole and broke its polished nails on the cement.

‘Take your hand away, my girl, or we’ll never get you out,’ Pluto bellowed.

But the long slim fingers still clawed desperately. As Porta hit them with his buckled belt the skin broke and blood oozed out. With another smack they lost their grip and slid like dying worms away from the crack.

New explosions. Cries and swearing. Timber hurtled down with stone and gravel into the sparkling phosphorrain. We were trapped on all sides. The policeman lay inert on his back, beaten by exhaustion. Pluto casually rubbed the toe of his boot on his face and said: ‘He’s had it. The Tommies have dished out more than the old bastard could take.’

‘To hell with him,’ Lieutenant Harder retorted impatiently. ‘Germany is full of tough-guy policemen. How many poor devils has he put in gaol? Forget him.’

We got on with our work.

Then one big explosion, the biggest we had ever experienced, shook the ground under us. Then another and another and another. We flung ourselves headlong into cover and pressed ourselves flat. Those were no stray drops.

It was the start of a new raid.

The phosphorus streamed on to the asphalt. Petrol bombs spurted fire-fountains twenty yards into the air. Flaming phosphorus poured down over the ruins like a cloudburst. It whistled and whirled in a tornado of fire and explosives. The biggest air-mines literally lifted whole houses into the air.

Porta lay beside me. He blinked encouragingly through the gas-mask’s large screen. I felt as if my mask was full of boiling water and steam. It pressed against my temples. A choking terror gripped my throat. ‘In a moment you’ll get shell-shock,’ the words shot through my head. I half sat up. I had to get away, no matter where, anywhere, only away.

Porta was over me like a hawk. A kick, and I was in the hole again. He hit me again and again. His eyes gleamed through the screen of the gas-mask. I shouted:

‘I want to go, let me go!’

Then it was over. How long did it last? One hour? One day? No, ten to fifteen minutes. And hundreds had been killed. I, a panzer soldier, had shell-shock. My friend had damaged my jaw. One tooth was broken. One eye was swollen. Every nerve screamed in wild revolt.

The city had turned into a furnace of foaming fire where people ran shrieking from the ruins which flamed like a gas-stove’s blue burners. Living torches, they tottered, whizzed round and fell, stood up and went faster and faster. They kicked, shouted and screamed only as people can scream in death agony. In a flash a deep bomb-crater was filled with burning people: children, women, men, all in a danse macabre supernaturally lighted.

Some of them burned with a white, others with a crimson flame. Some were consumed in a dull yellow-blue glow. Some died quickly and mercifully, but others ran around in circles, or reeled backwards rolling head over heels and twisting like snakes before they shrank into small charred dummies. Yet some still lived.

The Old Un, always so calm, broke down for the first time in our experience. He shouted in a thin high-pitched scream:

‘Shoot them. For Christ’s sake, shoot them!’

He put his arms across his face to shut out the sight. Lieutenant Harder tore his pistol out of its holster, slung it at The Old Un and shouted hysterically:

‘Shoot them yourself! I can’t.’

Without a word Porta and Pluto drew their pistols. Taking careful aim, they opened fire.

We saw people hit by bullets aimed with deadly precision, fall, kick a little, scratch a few times with their fingers, and then lie still to be immolted in the flames. It sounds brutal. It was brutal. But better a quick death from a heavy-calibre bullet than a slow one in a monstrous grill. Not one of them had a chance of rescue.

From the cellar of that devastated Children’s Home rose cries to heaven from hundreds of children’s throats, the cries of suffering, trembling children, innocent victims in an infamous war such as no one had ever imagined before.

Time after time, Pluto, Möller and Stege crept down into the gloom and pulled them out. When the cellar at last collapsed, we had managed to get a quarter of them out. Most of them died shortly afterwards. Pluto was trapped between two granite blocks and only sheer luck saved him from being crushed. We had to prise him loose with crowbars and pickaxes.

Exhausted, we threw ourselves on the trembling ground. We tore off our gas-masks, but the stench was so nauseating that it was intolerable without them. A sweetish, all-pervading smell of corpses was mixed with the sour, choking stench of charred flesh and the odour of hot blood. Our tongues stuck to our palates. Our eyes stung and burned.

Glowing roof tiles whirled through the air. Smoke-blackened flaming joists sailed through the streets like leaves driven on an autumn evening.

We ran crouching between the banks of flame. In one place a huge unexploded air-mine, evil messenger of death, stood darkly against the sky. Several times we were blown along the streets by the gale which had developed. It resembled a gigantic vacuum-cleaner. We scrambled and waded through a morass of skinned bodies, our boots slipping in jellied, bloody flesh. A man in a brown uniform staggered towards us. The red and black of the swastika on his armband was like a mocking challenge, and our grip tightened on our implements.

Lieutenant Harder said hoarsely:

‘No! Cut that out …’

A trembling hand tried to restrain Porta, but the motion was half-hearted. With an oath, Porta swung his pickaxe and sank the point into the party member’s chest as Bauer swung his spade and split the man’s skull.

‘By Christ, well done!’ Porta shouted, and laughed savagely.

People were twisting in agony on the ground. The tram rails were red-hot and curled into grotesque patterns which thrust out of the hot asphalt. People who had been trapped in their houses jumped in madness from what had once been windows and hit the ground with soggy thuds. Some shuffled along on their hands dragging maimed legs behind them. Men thrust away wives and children who clung to them. People had become animals. Away, away, only away. The only thing that mattered was to save oneself.

We met other soldiers from the barracks who were out like us to do whatever rescue work was possible. Many of these parties had senior officers with them, but leadership had often been taken by an old front-line sergeant or corporal. Only experience and nerves of steel mattered here, not rank. As we dug and heaved to free people from the collapsed cellars terrible scenes met us in the hot, stinking rooms which had been shelters.

In one place five hundred people were crowded into a concrete shelter. They were side by side with their knees comfortably drawn up, or on the floor with their heads pillowed on their arms. Asphyxiated by carbon monoxide they had suffered no apparent injury.

In another cellar were scores of people lying on top of each other, burnt to a solid mass.

Screaming, sobbing, childish cries for help:

‘Mummy, Mummy, where are you? Oh, Mummy, my feet hurt!’

Women’s voices calling in anguish for their children – children who were crushed or burned or swept away by the gale of fire or who were tottering aimlessly down the streets stupefied with terror. Some found their loved ones, but hundreds never saw them again. God knows how many were sucked up in the hot breath of the giant vacuum-cleaner, or carried away in the river of refugees pouring from the stricken city into the dark fields, into the unknown.

Dead, dead, only the dead. Parents, children, enemies, friends, piled in one long row, shrunken and charred into fossils.

Hour after hour, day after day shovelling, scraping, pushing and. . .