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“I’d take one of our firing squads over Ivan’s bayonet any day.”

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“I’d take one of our firing squads over Ivan’s bayonet any day.”

23.09.2018

Picture: history-doc.ru

75 years ago the Battle of Kursk was completed after 2 months of the WW2 tireless battle on the ground and in the air. Four million people from the both sides have taken part in it. It was the largest tank warfare in recorded history of World War 2. Let's look at it through the eyes of the young German soldier. The novel is written by French author Guy Sajer as a personal narrative of his experiences as a German soldier on the Eastern Front as a part of the Great Germany division. Following his memoirs, the terror of Soviet artillery was one of the worst experiences of the war.

The sun is beating down onto the massive slates. We stretch out full length, and brace our heels against the gutter so that we won’t roll into the courtyard.
It was still daylight when an enemy barrage ripped into the orchards and the advancing troops, who had stopped only a short distance from us. We dived into our cellar shelter, and stared anxiously at the ceiling, which rained down plaster with each explosion.
“We’ll have to shore it up too,” said the veteran. “If anything lands too close, the whole thing will come down on our heads.”
The bombardment lasted for at least two hours. A few Soviet shells fell right beside us, but they were clearly intended for the assault troops. Our big guns answered theirs, and all other sounds were drowned in the noise of artillery. Shells from our howitzer were shooting right over our ruin, contributing as much to the collapse of our ceiling as the Russian shells which sometimes burst less than thirty yards away.
During the bombardment, we were all gripped by an extreme and exhausting tension. Some of us attempted predictions, only to be contradicted by events a few moments later. The veteran smoked nervously, continuously begging us to shut up. Kraus had drawn apart and sat muttering in a corner. Perhaps he was praying.
In the evening, one of the counter-attack units visited us, and installed an anti-tank gun nearby. A colonel came by a little later and tested the new supports we had put in to prevent any further collapse of the roof.
“Well done,” he said. He made the rounds of our little group, offering each man a cigarette. Then he rejoined his unit, which was part of the Gross Deutschland, a little closer to the front.
It grew dark. Through the tattered silhouettes of the remaining orchard trees, the horizon glowed red with fire. The battle was not yet over, and the extreme tension it generated was almost unbearable. We had to take turns standing guard outside, and no one had a good night’s sleep. We were rounded up well before dawn and forced to abandon our well-organized hole and proceed further into Soviet territory. The German advance had not been stopped.
During our advance, we crossed a frightful slaughtering ground of Hitlerjugend , mixed into the dirt by the bombardment of the day before. Each step made us realize with fresh horror what could become of our miserable flesh.
“Somebody should have buried all this mincemeat so we wouldn’t have to look at it,” Hals grumbled.
Everyone laughed, as if he’d just said something funny.

We crossed a piece of ground so heavily pitted with shell holes it was hard to imagine that anyone who’d been on it could have survived, and an open-air hospital behind an embankment from which the shrieks and groans came so thick and fast it sounded like a scalding room for pigs. We were staggered by what we saw. I thought I would faint. Lindberg was crying with terror. We crossed the enclosure with our eyes fixed on the sky, seeing as if in a dream young men howling with pain, with crushed forearms or gaping abdominal wounds, staring with incomprehension at their own guts puffing out the piece of cloth which had been hastily flung over them.
Immediately beyond the hospital, we had to wade across a canal. The cool water which rose over our waists made us feel much better. On the far bank, the springing turf was strewn with Russian bodies. A Soviet tank, twisted and blackened by fire, stood beside a big gun and the shattered bodies of its operators. To our left, in the northeast, the battle continued more fiercely than ever. We thought we heard a groan from one of the Russian gunners, and went over to a man smeared with blood, who was leaning, gasping, against one of the wheels of the gun carriage. One of our men uncorked his drinking bottle, and lifted the head of the dying man. The Russian stared at us through enormous eyes, widened by terror or shock. He cried out, and then his head fell back, thudding against the metal of the wheel. He was dead.

We continued across a series of rolling wooded hills, where our front-line troops were regrouping and catching a moment’s rest in the shade of the trees. Many men wore bandages, whose whiteness stood out sharply against their gray, dusty faces. We were rapidly regrouped, called out, and sent to precise locations.
The two grenadiers who had joined us were sent somewhere else, while our 8th group was completed by a new pair of strays. Unfortunately, the stabsfeldwebel whom I’ve mentioned before, and who had only one more day of life, was made the leader of our group. We were swiftly attached to an armored section which transported us on the backs of their machines to the edge of an enormous plateau, which seemed to stretch into infinity….
We jumped off the backs of the moving Panzers to join a group of soldiers lying flat at the bottom of a shallow trench. Already, several 50-mm. rounds fired directly at us by enemy artillery had brought it home to us that we were in the front line. The tanks turned back, and vanished under the trees some fifty yards behind us.
We plunged down beside the fellows who were already there, who seemed none too cheerful. The Russian fire followed the tanks, and was lost in the brush. Our idiot stabsfeldwebel was already feeling uneasy about the distractions of the neighborhood, and was discussing them with a very young lieutenant. Then the young officer waved to his men, who followed him toward the woods, running, and bent nearly double. The Popovs, who must have been watching, sent over five or six rounds aimed directly at them. Some of their bullets landed very close to us.
Once again we were alone — nine of us in a hole, facing the Soviet lines. The sun was directly above us.

“Get cracking on that hole, now,” shouted the stabs in a perfect parade-ground voice.
We began to turn over the dusty Ukrainian soil with our short pick-spades. We barely had time to speak. The heat of the sun was crushing, and increased our lassitude.
“We’ll probably die of exhaustion before anything else has a chance to get us,” Hals said. “I give up.”
“My head is killing me,” I answered with a sigh.
But our bastard stabs kept after us, staring anxiously out over the grassless plain, which stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see.
We had just finished setting up our two spandaus when the noise of tanks rolling over the brush behind us made us shudder. On that magnificent summer afternoon, German tanks were once again leaving the shade and driving toward the east. From behind them, entire regiments, bent double, passed us and vanished into a wall of dust, which hid them from view. About five minutes later, the Russians began a bombardment of unprecedented ferocity. Everything became opaque, and the sun vanished from our eyes, which had become enormous with fright. The storm cloud of dust was relieved only by continuous red flashes shooting up against the darker masses of trees eighty or a hundred yards away. The earth shook harder than I’d yet felt it do, and the brush behind us burst into flame. Screams of fear froze in our constricted throats. Everything seemed displaced. The air all around us was filled with flying clods, mixed with fragments of metal and fire. Kraus and one of the newcomers were buried in a landslide before they even knew what had happened to them. I threw myself into the deepest corner of our hole, and stared uncomprehendingly at the stream of earth flooding towards our shelter. I began to howl like a madman. Hals pressed his filthy head against mine, and our helmets clattered together like two mess tins. Hals’s face was transfigured by terror.
“It’s… the… end,” he gasped, his words broken up by the explosions, which took away our breath.
Overwhelmed by horror, I could only agree.

Suddenly, a human figure crashed into our hole. We both trembled with desperation and fright. Then a second human shape joined the first, in a great leap. This time our huge eyes took in that these were two of our own men. One of the newcomers shouted to us through his frantic gasps for breath: “My whole company was wiped out! It’s terrible!”
He carefully lifted his head just over the edge of the embankment as a series of explosions began to rip through the air beside us. His helmet and a piece of his head were sent flying, and he fell backward, with a horrifying cry. His shattered skull crashed into Hals’s hands, and we were splattered with blood and fragments of flesh. Hals threw the revolting cadaver as far as he could, and buried his face in the dirt.
The explosions had become so violent that we felt the ground all around us must be shifting. Outside our hole, on the torn and ravaged plain, we could hear an engine roaring out of control. Then there was another explosion, more violent than all the others, and an enormous flash of light swept the edge of our trench. Our two spandaus fell back on top of us in a wave of loose earth. Those who weren’t struck dumb with fright howled like madmen:

“We’re finished!”
“Mama! It’s me!”
“No, no!”
“We’ll be buried alive!”
“Help!”
But nothing we said could put an end to this hell, which seemed to go on forever….
About thirty soldiers on the run plunged in with us. We were kicked and shoved without mercy, as everyone tried to burrow down as deeply as possible. Whoever was left on top was finished. The earth all around us was pocked with thousands of shell holes, and from each of these we could hear the sounds of fleeing soldiers looking for refuge. But the cruel Russian soil was torn by fresh salvoes, and those who thought they’d been saved continued to die.
We heard the roar of airplane engines, and cheers for the Luftwaffe rose from thousands of desperate men. The bombardment continued for a few more seconds, and then decreased dramatically.
The officers who were still alive blew their whistles for retreat, and the men packed into our hole poured out like rabbits chased by a ferret. We were about to follow when our stabsfeldwebel, who hadn’t yet been killed, shouted loudly after us: “Not you! We’re here to stop a Russian counteroffensive. Get your guns ready to fire.”
Six Hitlerjugend cadavers were lying on the bottom of the trench, which had completely changed shape. To the left, one end was caved in, and Kraus’s boots were sticking out of two cubic yards of gray dirt. The other grenadier had been completely buried.
With the help of the veteran, whose face was streaming with blood, we were able to get the F.M. back into place. The plain, which had been altered beyond recognition, was scarred with holes and lumps, as if giant moles had been at work. Wherever one looked, there were smoke and flame and a scattering of motionless bodies. In the distance, through spirals of dust and smoke, we could see geysers of fire from the bombs which our ME-110’s were dropping on the Russian artillery. It looked as though we’d hit a couple of their ammunition dumps. The shock waves from those explosions engulfed the earth and sky in an extraordinary intensity of light and displacement of air.
“Those bastards!” shouted the ober. “Now they’re getting what they deserve.”
Our ME-110’s turned back to the west, and the Russian artillery opened up again. They were concentrating particularly on the Panzers, which were retreating in disorder, with at least half their number destroyed.

Although my left arm had almost been broken when the gang of panic-stricken soldiers jumped into the trench on top of us, I had felt nothing at the time. Now, it was beginning to cause me violent pain, which hovered beside me like a supplementary presence; but I was too busy to pay much attention to it. The bombardment was continuing to the north and to the south, and then passed over us once again, intensifying and spreading its complement of pain and terror. Our group of stupefied men could breathe only with difficulty, like an invalid who gets up after a long illness to find he has lost both strength and wind. We were all unable to speak: there was nothing to say then about the hours we had just lived through, and there is no way of describing them now with the vehemence and force they require. Nothing remains for those who have survived such an experience but a sense of uncontrollable imbalance, and a sharp, sordid anguish which reaches across the years un-blunted and undiminished, even for someone like me, who is attempting to translate it into words, although a precise and appropriate vocabulary remains elusive.
Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb.
From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead.
We were madmen, gesturing and moving without thought or hope. Our legs and arms were numbed by hours of crowding and shoving against neighbors, living or dead, who were taking up too much room. The stabsfeldwebel repeated mechanically that we must maintain our position, but each new series of explosions sent us plunging to the bottom of our hole.
Night fell before we realized day had ended, and with darkness our terror returned.
<…>

Finally, toward midnight, everything fell silent. However, no one moved. We all felt so weakened that movement was beyond the limit of possibility. Finally the veteran was able to make us pay attention:
“Don’t go to sleep, boys — this is when Ivan will attack.”
The stabs stared at him with troubled eyes. He stood up and leaned against the trench wall. A few minutes later, his head fell forward, and he was lost in paralytic sleep.
The veteran continued to exhort us, but the six of us who were left received his pleas with a silence as absolute as the silence of our eight corpses. Sleep was crushing us, as the guns had not quite managed to do. If the Russians had chosen that moment to attack, they would undoubtedly have saved a great many lives on their side. Our advance interception positions were manned only by sleepers and dead men. Although there must have been more noise from the big guns, and more flares, our ears picked up nothing for the next four hours.

<…>
We looked away with indifference; death had lost any dramatic importance for us; we were used to it. While the others were shifting the carrion, Hals and I continued to discuss our chances of survival.
“Hands and feet hurt more than other places, but aren’t really serious.”
“I wonder what happened to Olensheim.”
“Broken arm, I heard.”
“How’s your arm?”
“My shoulder hurts like hell.”
Behind our backs the others were hard at their filthy work.
“Heinz Veller, 1925, unmarried… poor fellow.”
“Let’s see your shoulder,” Hals said. “Maybe you’re badly hurt.”
“I don’t think so… just a bruise,” I said, unfastening my harness.
I was about to pull the cloth away from my shoulder when a roll of thunder shook the pure morning air. A second later, a hail of Russian shells fell all around us, and once again we collapsed in terror at the bottom of our hole.
“My God,” someone shouted. “It’s starting again.”
Hals was moving closer to me, through a shower of flying clods. He had just opened his mouth to say something when a violent explosion very near us drowned the sound of his voice.
“We’ll never be able to hold on,” he said. “We’d better get out.”
A shell fell so close to us that the gray earth wall of the trench glowed red in the light of its flames. A thick cloud of smoke enveloped us, and cubic yards of earth fell into our holes. We could hear cries of fright, and then the voice of the stabs: “Anyone hit?”
“God!” shouted the veteran through a spasm of coughing. “Where the hell’s our artillery?”
Lindberg had begun to tremble again. Then the Russian fire stopped. The veteran peered carefully out, and after him our seven heads rose above the rampart. We stared at the plain, which was still scattered with trailing clouds of dust. In the distance, besides the wood, someone was howling.
“They must be running short of shells,” said the stabs, grinning. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have stopped so quickly.”
The veteran looked at him with his habitual resigned expression.
“I was just thinking the same thing about our artillery, stabsfeldwebel. I was wondering why they weren’t firing.”
“We’re preparing an offensive — that’s why our side is quiet. Soon we’ll see our tanks…”
The veteran stared at the horizon.
“I’m sure,” the stabs went on, “that our offensive will begin again, any minute now….”
But we were watching the veteran: his eyes were growing wider and wider, and so was his mouth, which seemed ready to howl.
The stabs had shut up too; we all followed the direction of our gunner’s eyes.

In the remote distance, a thin black line stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, and was moving toward us like a wave rolling toward the shore. We stood watching for a moment: the line was dense, and somehow unreal. Then the veteran shouted in a voice which paralyzed us with fear: “It’s the Siberians! They’re here! There must be at least a million of them!”
He gripped the butt of his F.M., and a demented laugh burst through his clenched teeth. In the distance, a confused tumult of thousands of roaring voices swelled like a hurricane wind.
“Every man to his post,” shouted the stabs, whose eyes remained fixed, as if hypnotized, on the irresistible Soviet tide.
We had all picked up our guns like automatons, and braced our elbows against the parapet. Hals was trembling like a leaf, and Lindberg, his number-two man, seemed unable to handle the belt of 7.7s.
“Get closer to me,” Hals shouted. “Get closer or I’ll kill you!”
Lindberg’s face was quivering, as if he were about to burst into tears. The veteran wasn’t shouting any more. His gun was on the crook of his shoulder, his finger was on the trigger, and his teeth were clenched tightly enough to break. The Soviet war cry was growing continuously louder and more distinct. It was like a long shout, muffled by its great volume.
We remained frozen by the danger, unable to judge its magnitude. Our stupor was too great; we were like paralyzed mice facing a snake. Then Lindberg broke down. He began to cry and shout, and left his post, throwing himself down on the trench floor.
“They’ll kill us! They’ll kill us! We’ll all be killed!”
“Get up!” shouted the stabs. “Get back to your post or I’ll shoot you right now!”
He dragged him to his feet, but Lindberg had gone as limp as a rag, and was streaming with tears.
“You bastard!” shouted Hals.
“Get killed then. I’ll take care of this damned thing myself.”
By now we could hear the Russian cries distinctly — a huge, continuous Ourrah!
“Maman!” I thought to myself. “Maman!”
“Ourrah! Ourrah pobieda!” muttered the veteran. “Just get a little closer.”
The human wave was now about four hundred yards from us. We could also hear the throb of engines, and see three planes, high in the brightening sky.
“Planes,” said the Sudeten. But we’d all noticed them already.
Our anxious eyes left the Russian horde for a moment. The airplane engines were screaming, as the planes dived down at top speed. “Messerschmitts!” shouted the stabs. “What guts!”
“Hurrah!” we all shouted. “Hurrah for the Luftwaffe!”

The three planes were strung out over the huge Russian thrust, spraying it with death. This seemed to be a signal for our mortars to open fire. They were hidden in the brush, and had lengthened their range. The spandaus which had survived the bombardment began to fire too, while the planes dived down, stimulating our troops to a feverish pitch of courage. I could feel the F.M. cartridges running through my hand at a dizzying speed. One clip was emptied, and we started another. Some of the big Wehrmacht guns had also opened fire, which must have had a lethal effect on the ranks of Bolsheviks, who were charging as in the days of Napoleon.
However, the human tide continued to roll toward us, making our scalps crawl. Only the weight of our helmets kept our filthy hair from standing straight up on our heads, although the idea of death itself no longer terrified us. My eyes remained fixed on the smoking metal of the F.M. in the steady hands of the veteran. The trembling belt of cartridges moved forward into the machine, shaken as if by a titanic frenzy.
“Prepare the grenades!” shouted the stabs, who was firing with his Luger braced on his left arm.
“It’s useless!” shouted the veteran even louder. “We haven’t got enough ammunition. We can’t stop them. Order the retreat, stabsfeldwebel, while there’s still time.”
Our frantic eyes moved from the lips of one man to the other. The Russian war cry, “Ourrah pobieda!” roared closer and closer.
The men were firing from their hips as they ran, and the air shook with the rushing flight of their bullets.
“You’re crazy,” answered the stabs. “No one can get away from here, and our boys should be coming any minute now — so keep firing, for the love of God.”
But the veteran had already loaded his F.M. and picked up the last magazine.
“You’re the one who’s crazy. ‘Any minute now’ is too late. But you go ahead and die right here, if that’s what you want.”
“No! No!” shouted the stabs.
The veteran had just jumped from the trench and was galloping toward the woods, bent over as far as he could, and calling to us as he ran. We grabbed our guns in frantic haste.
“Run!” shouted the Sudeten.
We all followed him. For a moment we were almost mad with terror, racing toward the shattered trees with our lungs on fire, while Russian bullets whistled through the air all around us. There were still seven of us, which seemed astonishing. The stabs had finally followed everyone else, but was still protesting and shouting: “Cowards! Shoot back! You’ll all be killed! Put up a fight!”
But we continued to run for the trees.
“Halt!” the stabs shouted. “Halt, you cowards!”
We had just caught up with the veteran, who had stopped for a minute behind what was left of a tree. I was right beside him.
“You bastard!” the stabs yelled. “I’ll report you for this!”
“I know,” the veteran said gasping, almost laughing. “But I’d take one of our firing squads over Ivan’s bayonet any day.”

Sajer Guy. The Forgotten Soldier (The Diary of the Third Reich soldier 1942–1945)

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