Italy near Naples 1943 It was a crisp morning in the grounds of the hospital as Colonel Weiss sat back with a cigarette and a coffee. The cold weather was causing his leg to ache and his memory drifted back to that fateful day in Tunisia when the Artillery bombardment tore the earth around him. Being carried back to the aid post he remembered the men he left behind had wished him well and he remembered with pride, the courage they had shown in their faces, no supplies, no Luftwaffe and a well equipped and hardened enemy closing in on the last remnants of the once proud Deutsche Afrika Korp in and around Tripoli. The ship back to Italy was harassed all the way by the Allied Air force and many times he never thought he would set foot on dry land again.

The consolation was that many of his comrades were on the ship with him and would live to fight another day. After the failures of the German Forces in Sicily and the Allied landings at Salerno he knew that the Allied war machine was able to dictate the terms on which they fought with no apparent barriers posed by the once mighty Luftwaffe. Gone were the heady days of 1939 and 1940 and his attitudes had shifted from glory for the German People to a case of plain survival.  As he finished the cigarette a staff car screeched to a halt at the front of the hospital and a staff officer piled out and strode to the front desk with arrogance that he had seen many times before.

A feeling of dread built rapidly, making his throat dry, as the nurse pointed to where he was sitting and the staff officer strode towards him. He stopped in front of Weiss and saluted. "Herr Colonel Weiss?" "Yes," he replied suspiciously. "I need you to gather as many men that are capable of fighting and report to my divisions transport depot down the road where you will form a kampfgruppe."   Weiss reminded the leutnant that this was a hospital which seemed to have little or no effect on his demeanour. The leutnant looked coolly down at him from under his peaked cap and explained that the allies had advanced and broken through to the south and he needed an experienced officer to lead a force to stop them. This was an order from Generalmajor Sieckenius of 16 Panzer Division and was not up for discussion. "Do I have a choice?" he asked, knowing the answer! A look was all the staff officer gave him but he knew if he wanted to see his family again, he couldn’t say no.

The veteran officer walked, albeit with a limp, up to the ward where his men looked up as he entered. "Mein Kameraden" he said, "we have a job to do and I would not ask you for myself, but for the honour you have brought me, by being able to say that I led you, and for the pride in which we hold our unit. A staff officer has ’requested’ our services and any man that feels he is unable to fight I will think no less of him. I need as many of you that are able to fight to come with me to stop an Allied breakout to the south. I fear that if we do not do this, that this will be the last time we will fight together as a unit."

Some men that tried to volunteer he had to force back into their beds as he knew they were incapable of undertaking such a venture. He turned to look at them with a tear in his eye and bade them farewell. Three trucks pulled up to the front of the hospital and the ragged troops loaded the little gear they had. At the depot he quickly gathered the NCO’s from the unit and got them to scrounge all they could. The weapons were adequate unless they came up against armour and then all they had was the hope that the crews in the tanks were able to do there job effectively. Schmidt came around the corner grinning carrying a few teller mines. From hard won experience his men had learnt that mines are effective antitank weapons when that’s all you have got. The meeting with the panzer commander went well and he seemed willing to obey his orders, this was probably helped by the knights cross 1st class hanging at Weiss’s throat.

The men loaded there gear into the vehicles and pulled out heading south through the haze of the midday sun. As they rolled out the staff officer nodded to him and saluted, he offered no such compliment in reply. Weiss took the time motoring south along the road to assess there chances as he leaned against the wall of the halftrack enjoying his last cigarette, all the time looking at the terrain around him, for a good defensive position from which to launch an ambush and an assault.

He knew he could rely on his men to stand there ground, but was unsure of the tank commander they all seemed so young nowadays, but experience came quickly and he seemed enthusiastic. Nothing he could do to change that now anyway. Having half his men in halftracks was a bonus so he could be offensive with this force if he had to but was focussing on delaying the advance, but the second platoon in trucks would mean that they would have to fall back quickly to allow the trucks time to load and get out of range. The tanks were the newer Panzer IV G’s and they were a good tank with excellent range and able to fire effective close support against infantry.

The Hornisse though were another matter, an excellent gun but paper armour meant he would have to leave them where they could pick off targets at long range but not get involved in anything closer. They could still give an enemy tank a nasty surprise when they ambushed their advancing armour. The gunner of the Hornisse had told him of kills at ranges up to 4000 metres. The further away the better in his view. The two recon halftracks were useful to keep infantry at bay but not in an assault, so there role would be recon and report, and then fall back and let his grenadiers and tanks engage the enemy. He wished they had some heavy artillery support but with the front in upheaval he couldn’t rely on anything remaining static.

As they got closer to the front the sounds of battle began to ring in his ears, the adrenalin began pumping and the thoughts of his family immersed his mind. The smoke and the smell of the battle were assaulting his nostrils, as they pulled off the road and took cover. Weiss deployed his troops in ambush as he had many times before and waited for the first target to appear in the fields below. The allied advance was going to stop here... Return to Writing a Background...