Striking the Balance

The ammunition haulers grinned. They wore one-piece coveralls like the panzer crewmen, but in the field-gray of self-propelled gun units rather than panzer black. One of them said, “New toys for you here-a notion we borrowed from the Lizards and put into production for ourselves.”

That was plenty to get the panzer men crowding around them. Jager took shameless advantage of his rank to push his way to the front. “What do you have?” he demanded.

“We’ll show you, sir,” the fellow who’d spoken before answered. He turned to his companion. “Show them, Fritz.”

Fritz went around to the back of the Lorraine hauler, undid the whitewashed canvas tilt on top of the storage bin at the rear of the machine. He reached in and, grunting a little at the weight, drew out the oddest-looking shell Jager had ever seen. “What the devil is it?” half a dozen men asked at once.

“You tell ’em, Joachim,” Fritz said. “I never can say it right”

“Armor-piercing discarding sabot,” Joachim said importantly. “See, the aluminum sabot fits your gun barrel, but as soon as it gets out, it falls off, and the round proper goes out with a lot more muzzle velocity than you can get any other way. It’s capped with wolfram, too, for extra penetration.”

“Is that so?” Jager pricked up his ears. “My brother is a panzer engineer, and he says wolfram is in short supply even for machine tools. Now they’re releasing it for antipanzer rounds?”

“I don’t know anything about machine tools,Herr Oberst,”

Joachim said, and Fritz’s head solemnly bobbed up and down to signify he didn’t know anything, either. “But I do know these shells are supposed to give you half again as much penetration as you get with regular capped armor-piercing ammunition.”

“Are supposed to give you.” That was Karl Mehler, Jager’s loader. Loaders had an inherently pessimistic view of the world. When panzers were moving, they didn’t see much of it. They stayed down in the bottom of the turret, doing what the gunner and the commander ordered. If you were a loader, you never had a clue before a shell slammed into your machine. One second, you’d be fine; the next, butchered and burnt. Mehler went on, “How good are they really?”

Fritz and Joachim looked at each other. Fritz said, “They wouldn’t issue them to front-line units if they didn’t think they’d perform as advertised, would they?”

“You never can tell,” Mehler said darkly. “Some poor slobs have to be the guinea pigs, I suppose. We must have drawn the short straw this time.”

“That’s enough, Karl,” Jager said. The rebuke was mild, but plenty to make the loader shut up. Jager turned to the men with the munitions conveyor. “Do you have any of our conventional armor-piercing rounds to use in case these things aren’t as perfect as the people away from the firing line seem to think?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Joachim answered. “This is what came off the train, so this is what we have.”

The mutters that rose from the panzer crewmen weren’t quite rumbles of mutiny, but they weren’t rapturous sighs, either. Jager sighed, also not rapturously. “Well, we all still have a few rounds of the old issue, anyhow. We know what that will do-and what it won’t. Tell me one thing right now, you two: is this new round supposed to be able to pierce the frontal armor of a Lizard panzer?”

Regretfully, the ammunition resupply men shook their heads.“Herr Oberst, the next round that can do that will be the first,” Joachim said.

“I was afraid you were going to say as much,” Jager answered. “The way things are now, it costs us anywhere between six and ten panzers, on average, for every Lizard machine we manage to kill-that’s just panzer against panzer, mind you. It would be even worse if we didn’t have better crews than they do-but we’ve lost so many veterans that our edge there is going. The thing that would help us most is a gun that would let us meet them face-to-face.”

“The thing that would help us most is another one of those bombs that they set off outside of Breslau and Rome,” Gunther Grillparzer put in. “And I know just where to set it, too.”

“Where’s that?” Jager asked, curious to see what his gunner used for a sense of strategy.

“Lodz,” Grillparzer answered promptly. “Right in the middle of town. Blast all the Lizards and all the kikes there to kingdom come, just like that.” He was wearing gloves, so instead of snapping his fingers he spat in the snow.

“Wouldn’t mind getting rid of the Lizards,” Jager agreed. “The Jews-” He shrugged. “Anielewicz said he’d keep the Lizards from mounting a counterattack out of the city, and he’s done it. He deserves the credit for it, too. If you ask me.”

“Yes, sir.” The gunner’s round, fleshy face went sullen, not that Grillparzer didn’t look a little sullen most of the time. He knew better than to argue with his regimental commander, but he wasn’t about to think warm, kind thoughts about any Jews, either.