While the Red Army pushed into Poland toward our camp, which would soon be in the battle zone, we lay in the sun as much as we could, and waited for orders. Hals was daily more deeply in love, and spent as much time as he could with the girl he considered his fiancée. I often went with him, but never found a girl for myself. We had many pleasant times together, and Hals repeatedly told me that I must be due for a leave soon, and would surely see Paula. Sometimes, the two of them plainly wished to be alone, and I would take myself off.
The war seemed to have forgotten us in this enchanted place. But one morning our tranquillity and dreams of love came to an end. The camp hummed with activity, as companies packed up and prepared for action before our incredulous eyes. As motors hummed, the barracks were destroyed. Our amazement was complete.
“What’s going on?”
“Los! Los! Schnell! We’re clearing out!”
Before we had quite realized it, we were loaded onto dull gray blue trucks, which bumped off to the north. In the beautiful fullness of germinating spring, the settled, organized camp went up in flames behind us. The convolutions of smoke rising into the pure, still air seemed like a sinister presage of things to come.
In the trucks, everyone was talking. What was happening? Why were they destroying the camp? Where was the front now anyway?
Toward ten o’clock the Gross Deutschland column suddenly stopped, on a road dappled by the knobby shadows of branches loaded with thousands of buds bursting from the irresistible pressure of thousands of plump leaves still barely touched with green.
The birds, as unprepared as we for what was coming, were singing, and swooping down low over the trucks. A sidecar from liaison delivered orders to the officers’ Volkswagen. Then the noncoms told us to make a half turn.
Through the bursts of backfiring, we could hear the hum of a flight of planes. Then the whistles blew.
“Achtung! Enemy planes coming for us! Achtung!”
In a general rush, we jumped from the slowly moving trucks.
In fact, the Ilyushin fighter-bombers which had spotted us took their time. About fifteen of them were turning in the sky some four or five hundred yards above us. Some trucks had been precipitately abandoned, and were lying across the road. Our officers ran shouting at the drivers, who, caught between two fires, didn’t know what to do. Finally, they jumped back into their machines, started them up again and crashed them into the bank at the last possible moment, as the flight of vultures swooped down on us.
First, there were bombs, which we watched fall until the first explosions. They looked like fat darts, with their long shafts, which allowed them to explode just above the ground. The planes had divided into two groups; the second unloaded at about the same spot as the first.
The shock was extraordinarily violent. Everything flew into the air and fell onto our heads. An overturned truck flew toward us, stopping some ten yards short of where we lay. The flames spread quickly in our direction, forcing us to move farther back. We no longer had any doubts about what was happening, and ran as far as we could from the road, which was attacked again with rockets and machine guns.
The running men, intent on getting away, hadn’t noticed the second wave of planes and were cut down by the machine-gun fire, which passed over them like a pitiless reaper. Men were jolted off the ground as they ran, to fall back again in pieces, like puppets whose strings are broken.
When the enemy withdrew, eighteen of our machines were sending plumes of black smoke up into the sky. The attack had been so sudden and overwhelming that none of us quite grasped what had happened. We returned to the scene of the disaster with one eye on the sky; the enemy might only have pretended to leave, and might still be waiting to attack us again.
The road, still gluey from the recent thaw and the spring rains, was strewn with debris and shattered bodies. The violence of the impact had smashed some of the victims wide open, scattering their entrails over distances of seven or eight yards. The peaceful roadway, which had been filled with the sounds of twittering birds only fifteen minutes before, looked defiled.
Within fifteen minutes our column, made up of thirty trucks transporting three companies, had lost twenty men and eighteen trucks. There were also three wounded men in critical condition.
We collected the remains of our dead, and dug graves. Among the victims were Hoth and Dunde, who had both received Iron Crosses for their bravery on the second Dnieper front. They were both friends with whom we had been laughing and joking barely twenty-four hours before. After the event, the tragic impact of what had happened crushed and overwhelmed us.
We piled onto the remaining trucks, which seemed to buckle under the extra weight. There were men on the running boards, fenders, hoods, and bumpers. Budding twigs clung to these human swarms bumping forward at twenty-five miles per hour. Two of the trucks quickly died under the extra load, and the men they carried had to continue on foot. They joined us six hours later, on the Rumanian frontier, as we were getting ready to join the carnage at Vinnitsa, between the central front, which had been broken, and the southern front, which still seemed to be holding. On the way, these men had been attacked by Russo-Polish partisans; however, they were fortunately able to turn the encounter to their own advantage. They had taken the partisans’ horses, and a few more still left on neighboring farms, and had joined us looking like an apparition of chivalric fantasy. The weather was warm and sunny we were returning to Russia just after the period of melting ice. We requisitioned a few Rumanian trucks which had been left for civilian use, to replace the ones destroyed in the attack. These were old machines, bearing the names of private firms, which we didn’t have time to paint out. Our section drove off in an English moving van which must have left the factory sometime around 1930.
15. RETURN TO THE UKRAINE
After a rushed, jolting journey, we re-entered the Ukraine, where the ground had not yet entirely absorbed the spring runoff. There were long stretches of gluey mud which we were able to cross only with great difficulty. The weather was beautiful, even hot, and we often stripped to the waist.
On the road we received new orders. We were no longer to proceed to Vinnitsa. Instead, we were to re-establish communications between the rear and the front, which were continually harassed by partisans. We were ordered to annihilate these bands. Their attacks had grown increasingly virulent, and often paralyzed the already uncertain flow of supplies. The Vinnitsa bridgehead had to be maintained as a starting point for new German offensives which would break up the wedge the Russians had driven into Poland before Lvov, and re-establish a connection with the North, which appeared to be holding.
Our detachments, together with other units, had been given the job of engaging the partisans in a contest of ambush, in which the advantage belonged to whichever side surprised the other. Once again, the division was broken up. The largest section was sent to fight north of Lvov and in the northern sector of White Russia. Other units like ours were scattered throughout the rear areas of the south and central sectors before rejoining the division a few weeks later. Our zone of operations extended through Bessarabia as far as the Russian frontier. As before, we were a strong mobile unit designed to move quickly to the support of particular points in imminent danger.