Casca 42: Barbarossa Read online

  This is a book of fiction. All the names, characters and events portrayed in this book are Fictional and any resemblance to real people and incidents are purely coincidental.

  CASCA: #42 Barbarossa

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  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE CASCA SERIES IN EBOOKS

  CHAPTER ONE

  The night was coming to an end, and the false dawn was spreading across the sky in front of the thousands of eyes staring eastwards.

  The men were tense, all waiting, ready to begin what to them was expected to be the biggest test of their lives – the invasion of Soviet Russia. Any moment now they would be given the order to advance, and they would press the starter motors to wake up their steel leviathans, the panzers, silently standing in row upon row on what had been until recently Polish soil.

  One man sat patiently on the turret of his panzer mark IV, a man dressed in the black of the panzer korps along with his beret placed smartly atop his head. The silver badge of the skull, minus the lower jawbone, denoted him as a tankman. The dark of the night hid much of his features, but they were briefly illuminated as he bent his head forward to light his cigarette, a match cupped in his hand. The first thing that was noticeable was the scar that ran down the right side of his face from eye to the corner of his mouth, giving him a sinister look.

  It wasn’t a scar gained honourably in a duel, or in any battle. No, it was a mark of a vengeful Greek whore who had slashed his face for being short-changed.

  Nothing odd about that, perhaps, but the man had received it over nineteen hundred years previously, when he had been a Roman legionary serving in the tenth legion. The man, known then as Casca Rufio Longinus, had carried it ever since, even after that day on Golgotha when, as part of the execution squad detailed to crucify the Jew known as Jesus, he had been cursed to immortality.

  Casca had fought down the ages, never being allowed the peace of the dead. He had become a mercenary, fighting for whatever cause offered the best deal to him, sometimes for money, sometimes for honor.

  So here he now was, sat on the border of Soviet Russia along with the majority of the Wehrmacht, about to embark on yet another campaign into the vastness of a country he had fought in many times before. He didn’t have anything personally against the Russian people, but he did have a problem with their political system: Communism. He hated it – and communists.

  The last time he’d been in Russia had been during the time of the Bolshevik – Tsarist civil war. It had left him with an enduring hatred of that system, and he saw Hitler’s Germany as being the only force that could stand up to it.

  He leaned back and drew deeply on the cigarette. He blew out a cloud of smoke and looked to his left where a lean, tall man silently sat staring ahead. Casca – now known as Carl Langer – offered the man, known as Teacher, a smoke. Teacher took the cigarette, nodding his thanks, drew deeply on it, then handed it back.

  “Won’t be long now,” Teacher said in that soft, gentle voice the rest of the tank crew had come to know over the past year and a half.

  Langer shook his head. “Nope. Wish they’d get it over with.”

  “The waiting?”

  “Aye.”

  “Patience, that’s something I’ve heard you say often,” Teacher smiled in the dark. “We’ll be busy trying to stay alive before long. Don’t wish it on us.”

  “I’m not,” Langer said, “I’m hoping Gus’s farts don’t poison the entire army. The sooner we’re off the better. No good invading Russia if half of the army is dying.”

  Teacher laughed silently. “Why do you think I’m out here? It’ll be bad enough once we get going being in there with his anal emissions. I hope they call the damned thing off.”

  “Fat chance of that. Hitler wants Stalin’s blood. No room for both these bully boys in Europe. I just hope we haven’t bitten off more than we can chew.”

  Teacher grunted. “They didn’t do so well against the Finns in ’39, did they?”

  “No, but they learn.”

  Teacher nodded slowly. He breathed in deeply. “Might as well get inside, Gus’s farts or not. Shan’t be long before we get going.”

  Langer remained staring ahead with his thoughts. His crew had trained for a year since the end of the France campaign where they had won an astounding victory. Since then they had been back in Germany, firstly learning how to be infantrymen, much to Gus’s disgust, and then, to his delight, learning to use their new tank, a Mark IV.

  Throughout the French campaign they had been using a III but it had been wrecked, and a hasty replacement had lasted only as long as it taken them to get to Dijon before breaking down and refusing to move, despite threats and curses from Gus and Felix, the mechanic from Berlin who was their radio operator.

  Langer was happier they were in a IV. He and his crew had been assigned to the bigger tank since they had proved themselves one of the better crews, and experience had shown the Wehrmacht that bigger and better tanks were needed if they were to maintain their superiority, especially now they were going against the vast Russian forces and their thousands of armored vehicles. Up to now the IV had been used as fire support, but its 75mm gun was better than the IIIs’ 37s or 50s, and feelings were that the IV had to be altered to that of the main battle tank.

  So Langer and his crew, and the other best performing crews, were all put into what IVs they had. Not everyone had a IV, though. Langer was aware that despite the best intentions, the Wehrmacht still was short of good panzers.

  His musings were interrupted by the forward hatch clanging open and the unlovely visage of Gustav Beidemann, driver and one-man eating machine, appeared. Langer was thankful it was still too dark to see his features clearly. “So, Herr Feldwebel,” Gus said in his gravelly voice, “when are we going to spread the glory of national-socialism to the untermensch Bolsheviks and all other backward races?”

  Langer smiled to himself. Gus’s irreverence spared nothing. Anything was liable to be targeted, but was normally establishments and ruling elites. “I’m surprised, Gus, to hear you’re so politically motivated. I thought you were more interested in Russian women and vodka.”

  “So I am,” Gus admitted, “but only after both have been converted to the glory of Herr Schicklegruber’s manifesto! I shall only promise to ravish a Russian woman after she had renounced Bolshevism and kisses the icon of our leader I carry on my person, and have one of our ardent chaplains ex
orcise the curse of communism from any bottle of vodka I manage to get my hands on with a ritual involving swastikas and salutes. Sieg heil!”

  Langer caught the muffled laughter of Steffan, their loader, from beneath him in the turret. The hatch alongside Gus’s popped open and the dirty figure of their mechanic and radio operator, Felix, appeared, grinning. Felix had been a car mechanic before the war but had gotten into financial trouble and had fled to the army one step ahead of his creditors. “Carl, message to stand by coming through.”

  The joking and laughter stopped and they were all suddenly serious and business-like. Langer motioned the hatches shut and clamped his phones tight against his ears. There was static for a moment, then a tinny voice came through the tiny speakers. “Division will advance and neutralize all enemy units. Long live the Fatherland!”

  He looked to his left and slightly ahead to where Captain Heidemann’s panzer IV loomed, a dark, threatening shape against the slowly lightening eastern horizon. He was their unit commander. There were a mixture of IVs, IIIs and even some IIs scattered throughout the regiment. Heidemann waved an arm and pointed east, towards the Soviet border.

  “Right,” he barked into his microphone, down by his throat. “This is it, let’s go. Teacher, keep your eyes peeled for targets. Steffan, have both HE and AP standing by. Gus, keep us away from traps and hazards. Felix, you keep your eyes open for dangers.”

  The air was rent by scores of Maybach engines coughing into life, and clouds of exhaust fumes rose, filling the senses of the members of the 6th regiment of the 3rd Panzer Division with diesel, oil and rubber.

  Then they were off, rumbling towards the unseen Russian positions just over the border.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Everything was a mass of noise; the engine growling constantly, shouts from the crew at spotting yet another target, the clanging of shells being fitted into the breech of the 75mm short-barreled main gun and the chatter of the hull machine gun operated by Felix.

  They had hit resistance pretty soon after crossing into Soviet territory. The brown uniforms of the Russians scattered as the panzers clattered into their positions, shooting hard in every direction. Bullets spat back from rifles and machine guns but they bounced harmlessly off the armored sides of the metal beasts. Exhaust fumes rose from the tanks as they roared through the battle. They were making their way through the lines of the enemy armies positioned just to the south of Brest, the fortress city they had been in nearly two years previously when they had invaded Poland. After taking the place, it had been handed over to the Russians as per the agreement signed before the start of hostilities.

  Langer recalled the day or so they had been there, rescuing the diminutive whore Natalia and her cat from the approaching communists. He wondered what had become of the Jewish girl – she would hardly have had a better fate under the Nazis than the communists. She had been trying to get to Romania, but even there the fascists were now in power, led by Ion Antonescu and his Iron Guard. Hitler had leaned hard on King Michael, mostly because of Romania’s oil and the need to supply the Wehrmacht, and the Balkan country had slotted into line alongside Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Italy. Yugoslavia had briefly followed suit, but then they’d had a coup and Hitler had sent in the panzers to force the issue there, but not Langer or his division. They had been training hard.

  The Pz IV was a much more powerful vehicle than the III they’d used previously, and they’d had to learn the intricacies of the new tank before being let loose on the countryside, Gus hollering out in delight at the armament and power. “This is much more like it!” he had announced to an unsuspecting countryside, frightening a flock of crows up into the air from a nearby copse of tall trees. The corvids had clearly thought a meteorite had been landing in the field next to them. “Mamma Beidemann’s little boy needs the protection of something like this, not those cardboard toys Herr Schicklegruber gave us originally!”

  As they had bucked and bounced around the rolling countryside of eastern Germany down by the Silesian city of Breslau, Langer had gotten used to the new dimensions of the turret ring; it was much bigger than the III and therefore could take a bigger gun. The IV was heavier and much more solid, and felt more powerful as it had torn up the ground rolling up a slope, topping it and swinging on one track and plunging down to the next valley.

  At 22.3 tons it was the heaviest tank yet the Germans had produced, and the crew were reasonably well protected by frontal armor of 50mm and the sides were of 34.5mm, but the increased weight meant that the tracks were wider in order to spread the load better. This meant Gus had to get used to the extra width. Too many times trees and fences had been knocked over during their training exercises.

  The main armament was a short-barreled 75mm howitzer, put there for fire support, and it was backed up by two machine-guns – one in the turret which was Steffan’s responsibility, and the other in the hull which was Felix’s – which were 7.92mms. Gus was delighted with the 320hp Maybach HL 120TRM engine with its six forward and one reverse gears, and they could get up to about 24mph out of the thing on a flat hard surface.

  So now here they were, plunging into the frontier units of the Soviet defences. Langer was keen to see how the machine performed, and, more importantly, how the crew did. Shots were rattling all round and he was particularly anxious about their flanks and rear. The frontal armor ought to be able to cope with the usual anti-tank weaponry they had faced so far, and the huge number of Russian tanks were inferior to their machine. The T26 was outmatched by the Pz III, so their IV ought to eat them for breakfast.

  “Anti-tank,” Teacher’s voice caught Langer’s attention.

  “Where?”

  “Ahead, left, by that line of earthworks,” the gunner’s laconic reply came.

  Langer pressed his face to his periscope and swung the lens. The feature leaped into his view. A crew of four were frantically loading their gun, a 37mm by the looks of things, behind a small ridge of mounded-up earth. It looked as if it had only just been dug. “HE, Steffan,” Langer said calmly. The Russians weren’t looking at them, they were concentrating directly ahead of their position, automatically following orders to shoot, probably issued by an officer who was in all probability dead by now.

  A fountain of earth erupted close by to their right, showering the tank with clods of earth. “Felix – what was that?” Langer yelled.

  The tank reverberated to Teacher’s shot. Langer watched as the earthworks blew apart right where the gun was, and he saw the long barrel flying aside, a couple of rag dolls being catapulted away by the force of the explosion.

  Voices chattered away in his ears constantly – he had found the frequency of the Russian local forces. He knew what his orders were and, besides, Felix would tell him if any fresh orders came through. The Russian junior officers were screaming in panic, asking for orders. They had no idea how to cope with the massed armored force that had hit them and was even at this moment, with the day barely an hour old, slicing through their lines like a hot knife through butter.

  “Tank,” Felix snapped, “to the right – looks like a BT.”

  “Gus – go!” Langer ordered, swinging his periscope round, frantically rotating the handle. The tank shot forward, growling up the incline of the earthwork. “I see it,” he said, centering his sight on the low-silhouette armored vehicle. It was a light tank and fast, but under-armored. “Steffan, AP.”

  Steffan grabbed one of the armor piercing rounds from a rack and slid it smoothly into the gaping breech, waiting to be fed. With a practiced flick of the wrist the breech was closed and Teacher rotated the wheel that powered the turret movement. His sights found the BT, swinging round on one track to get a better sight of the IV. Gus gunned the engine and the IV bounded down off the earthwork, grinding the trench behind it, collapsing the two walls. Bodies of Soviet infantrymen lay at the bottom, cut down by the machine guns of the panzers.

  “Got it!” Teacher exclaimed, watching as his shot hammered into the Russ
ian tank, stopping it in its tracks, causing it to shudder. Smoke began billowing out through every hole and gap, and the three-man crew flung open their hatches to escape.

  “Nice shot. Let’s get going, Gus,” Langer ordered, seeing the way clear towards a large group of dark shapes in the distance. “Looks like an ammo dump up ahead. Send HE into those mounds.”

  “What about capturing it, Carl?” Teacher asked, looking away from his eyepieces.

  “Their ordnance doesn’t fit our weapons, and I want to blow anyone hiding along there out of the way.”

  The panzer rumbled on, leaving smoke behind it from burning vehicles, buildings and gun emplacements. Heidemann’s voice crackled through the earphones, telling them to group up at a railway line beyond the now exploding ammunition dump. Engines overhead roared as Stukas flew ahead, aiming to plaster the rear areas, shattering supply lines and reinforcements rushing to try to stem the breakthrough.

  “T26s, Carl,” Felix said. “Coming round the burning ammo dump.”

  “Got them.” Langer saw four of the light tanks with their 45mm long barreled guns as they appeared, bouncing over the uneven terrain. “Teacher, take them out – now!”

  Steffan loaded AP without being told to. Teacher zeroed in on the leading tank, clearly the commanding officer’s, and send a shot into the junction of the turret and the main body. There came a loud explosion and the turret lifted off, rising on a rapidly expanding fireball, then lazily somersaulting over twice before crashing to the earth fifty feet away. The barrel embedded itself in the ground where it landed.

  Gus roared in glee. “This is some bitch! I’m in love!”

  Teacher ignored the outburst, calmly selecting the T26 that swerved round the thickly burning commander’s. The next shot smashed into the turret, turning both gunner and commander into jelly, splattering them against the walls of the tank. The driver lost his head and his torso slumped forward against the driving levers, sending the tank round mindlessly to strike the burning first tank where it rested.