On the way it was passed from man to man that we had set off as Army Reserve and should be getting some rest. I believed it, the old hands did not. On 23 August 1942, in the brightness of the dawn morning, we arrived in the camp in the woods and settled ourselves down in the barracks. I slept for some hours. Towards noon there was something to eat and afterwards there was a front-line film show. While the film Der grosse Schatten, ‘The Great Shadow’, was still running, the Battalion Adjutant shouted ‘Alert!’ Barely five minutes later the battalion was standing ready to march. When the lorries of an Army mobile column arrived we were immediately loaded up. We were told that the Russians had broken through at Juchnow and that we were to be thrown in to the gap created by that move.
The journey through the bare countryside, only here and there crossed by bushes and woods, was not exactly pleasant. We travelled standing, squatting, or sitting on machine-gun boxes. The ‘oldies’ who had taken part in the advance and the winter retreat, said that it was no picnic which awaited us. We younger ones, ‘dropped in the shit’, again, did indeed feel the tension hanging over everyone. It could be read in the expressions of the officers. But it was more with curiosity and interest than with fear that we looked forward to the things that this ‘fire brigade’ action would bring.
Outside the village of Saawinki, some thirty kilometres north-west of Medyn, we were unloaded. Immediately, a security line was formed in platoon strength in the direction of the enemy. I lay with my section beside the road that led to the enemy. Somewhere in front there were still supposed to be German troops. No-one knew any more. A motorcycle with sidecar drove up from behind us. A strange officer got out. To my report he said, sounding surprised, ‘Infanterieregiment 7! My God, that’s an active regiment!’ To my ears it sounded as if he had determined that from then nothing else could happen and that it was a dead certainty that the Russian breakthrough would be cleaned up.
Just as we had hastily dug in, I was taken by a runner to the battalion commander. He ordered me, and the section, to carry out a reconnaissance patrol into the woods that lay about two kilometres in front of us. The object was to find out if they were occupied by the enemy. It was my first reconnaissance patrol. It was the real thing, the active beginning of my probation at the front. On the successful completion of this depended my whole life’s ambition! I instructed the men and we set off.
The first signs of dusk were just becoming noticeable when we reached the woodland. We went in line, spaced widely apart, but could see no trace of the enemy. We crossed a tongue of woodland, while I, as I had learned during training, tracked our direction of march with a compass. Finally, we marched in a long curve leftwards as far as the road and turned back. Halfway the battalion met us. In the meantime they had been ordered to take up positions in front of the wood facing the enemy. The tongue of woodland we had just crossed was the edge of a larger forest that stretched over to the right. It offered the Russians a good opportunity to take us unopposed in the rear. An attempt was then made to counter the danger by having the 7th Company take up position almost at right angles to the forward-deployed 5th and 6th Companies. We would provide cover for the battalion from the direction of the wood.
To my disappointment, my section was held in reserve. We had to dig in again, but on fairly open ground. By that time night had fallen and it seemed to me that we would not be staying in that position for very long. I had the men dig only moderately deep foxholes, just deep enough to be able to snatch some hours’ sleep in them with adequate protection against shell splinters. The foxhole I had myself dug barely reached to my knees, so that my body, lying on bushes as a kind of bedding, and covered in the same way, did not protrude above the level of the ground. Within moments there crept over me the uncomfortable thought that I was lying in a coffin.
Night passed and gave way to morning. The enemy, it was said, were preparing to attack. From my ‘coffin’ I watched uneasily as, to the right of the sector of the 7th Company, 300m to 400m away, individual brown figures, at intervals of a minute or so, were jumping across a small clearing between covering undergrowth. To judge from the direction in which they were moving, they were evidently trying to get into the tongue of woodland lying to the battalion’s rear. The Russians were demonstrating their well-tried tactic of ‘trickling through’. You could work out how long it would take a company or still larger units to have gathered in the wood behind us. Those movements had been reported to the battalion.
Then the orders I had expected reached me. With my section, I had to take up position at the extreme wing of the 7th Company, facing west, in thick woodland. There was virtually no field of fire. In places it was only five to ten metres. On the left I was beside the section led by Kräkler, our old block senior. On the right there were no neighbours at all. When Kräkler and I saw each other neither of us thought of our time together being polished up into soldiers. It is true, it was a time that had not been as much an effort for him as it had for me. We just shook hands and said, as if with one voice, ‘Eh, lad, what a bloody mess!’
Once again it was the old story of digging holes. After we had finished it began to rain. Thin, continuous streams of rain trickled down from the sky. Sooner or later it would have soaked us to the skin. Of the enemy there was nothing more to be heard. We could only suspect that they must be somewhere ‘in front’ of us in the wood, in considerable numbers. Wrapped in branches and tarpaulins we tried to protect ourselves from the penetrating rain that fell even more heavily. Soon water began to gather in the foxholes. Hours passed. Still there was no end to the rain. The sound of the rain and the wind, and the darkness of night as it began to fall, could almost make us forget that we were on the front line and had to watch out for an enemy. After I had assigned the watch I tried, as I sat on the hollow side of my Stahlhelm in the puddles in my foxhole, to find some degree of comfort.
I was shaken out of my chilly doze when the order came to take two men on a reconnaissance patrol in the wood. I had to find where the Russians were. It seemed pointless to me. The rain was getting even heavier. There was complete darkness. It was already midnight. I considered the task to be well-nigh impossible. I would either find out nothing at all or possibly run right through the foxholes that the Russians had dug for themselves. I could lose my way, despite the compass, or even fall into a Russian foxhole unawares. In any of those cases the reconnaissance I was ordered to carry out would show no satisfactory result. I chose two volunteers and we set off. It was so dark that from time to time each of us had to keep hold of the other so as not to get separated. Again and again we would stop, and crouch down to listen. The darkness of the wood and the crackling rain did not allow us to hear or to see anything. With my machine-pistol cocked I felt my way, and crept forwards, my finger on the trigger, always expecting to be fired on suddenly out of the darkness, or to bump into a Russian, or at least a tree.