It so happened that my writing was still there when the class returned for the autumn term and prompted a lively discussion among the girls. Defying the opinion of the rest of the class, one of the girls, Betty Ros, decided to write to the address in Ireland as soon as the retreat of the German army from Holland made this possible. My parents had not heard from me for several months and only then guessed that I must have become a soldier. Since joining the army I had not been able to correspond through the Red Cross and was restricted to using the regular army-mail service, which operated with Germany only. My parents were now living in Mallow. My father had been appointed manager of the Tuam sugar factory in June 1939 and manager of the Mallow sugar factory in January of 1943.
After the war, Betty and I wrote to each other for some time, but, as the reader already knows, my romantic future lay elsewhere. Many years later, after Betty and I were both married, our families met when we visited them in Holland. Betty was now Mrs Jan Kooiker, with a large family and married to the organist of the catholic church in Vlijmen.
Our night in Hengelo was a short one. At four o’clock in the morning we were aboard our train and heading towards a very uncertain future.
5
ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT
For our journey east we were accommodated in the relative comfort of railway-carriages, rather than in goods-wagons which were normally used for the transport of troops. Dawn had already broken when we left Hengelo, but it was easy to doze off undisturbed by the gentle rocking of the train.
During the day we travelled in brilliant sunshine through Osnabrück, Hannover, Berlin and Frankfurt-on-Oder. I was glad to have the opportunity to see something of the north German landscape with its flat, fertile plains. It was quite a contrast to the hills and woods of central Germany and the Sudetenland which I knew so well. I thought the distinctive farmhouses in the area south of Hamburg and Bremen, with their deeply sloping roofs, to be particularly attractive.
As the day wore on, the inevitable pack of cards emerged and we all became relaxed and cheerful. In later years when I looked back on that train journey, which must surely have been an odds-on one-way ticket, I was surprised at my lack of fear or even trepidation. Although army training sets out to instil in its recruits an unquestioning acceptance of whatever may come, perhaps I was just a typical case of the optimism of so many young people who cannot imagine their own death. I have often wondered what my feelings would really have been like if I had known the horrific extent of the catastrophe that had just befallen the German armies on the Russian Front.
I really knew very little about the state of the war as we made our way eastwards. At the time, propagandist news reports spoke about the heroic acts of German forces engaging the Western Allies in France and Italy, and the Russians in the east. Retreats were admitted, but played down, and the expression “victorious in retreat” was frequently used. While it was obvious to me and to the German population at large, that the war was gradually being lost on all Fronts, it was only many years later that I learned the full truth of what had really happened. At the Front to which we were heading, it was not a retreat or even a rout that had taken place, but one of the most colossal defeats of the German army in the entire war.
The prelude to the sweeping Russian victory in the summer of 1944 can be considered to have started when they re-took Stalingrad in February 1943. There German forces had suffered 100,000 dead and 34,000 wounded, on top of which 85,000 men had been taken prisoner. In major battles along the Russian Front, German armies suffered further defeats and by the end of 1943 Russian forces were approaching the Polish-Romanian border. After making more large territorial gains they took a breathing space in May 1944. Although it was obvious that the Russian forces were being built up for an enormous onslaught, Hitler stubbornly refused to allow a shortening of the Front-line and this was to have catastrophic consequences. Hitler’s obstinacy resulted ultimately in the reckless and unnecessary sacrifice of the lives of countless German soldiers.
The ratio of the awesome power of the Russians compared with the strength of the German forces deserves mention. Apart from benefitting from an average 6:1 superiority in manpower, the ratio of equipment was even greater. It was 6.5:1 for aeroplanes, 7:1 for tanks and 16:1 for artillery. In fact, at breaching sections they deployed 600 guns per mile of front line giving them a superiority of 35:1 over German artillery, while manpower reached a superiority of 16:1. In the final two days leading up to the onslaught, 143,000 Polish guerrillas carried out 10,500 separate acts of sabotage behind the German lines on 21 and 22 June 1944, thus seriously affecting their supply routes.
The Russian onslaught came on 22 June, 1944. On 28 June, General Field Marshal Model took over the German Army-Group Middle. He was a master of “firebrigade action,” stopping up gaps and keeping the Front-lines reasonably intact. To him must be given credit for gradually stabilising a hopeless situation and restoring an orderly line of resistance. He prevented the even greater encirclement and destruction of the retreating German troops. The Front finally stabilised on 20 July, 1944, when it stretched from Narwa in the north through Warsaw to Bucharest in the south.
It was little wonder that within 12 days 350,000 German troops had been effectively wiped out. 200,000 soldiers were dead, 65,000 had been injured and 85,000 were taken prisoner. Many people know of the horrors of Stalingrad, but the huge losses of the German army (when casualties were twice as high in only a matter of days), quite apart from horrendous losses the Russians must have suffered, seems to have escaped general attention. On 25 July, my division Göring joined the Army-Group Middle.
That was the general position on the Russian Front as I headed east; a breathing space had been won, but the situation was highly fragile and, if anything, more critical than it had been on 22 June. The number of reserve troops to replace the 350,000 soldiers lost to active service could be only very limited, and many of these would lack Front-line experience. Meanwhile, the Russians had been able to make up their losses and were back to a complement of 2.5 million troops on the Middle-Front.
After an uneventful journey through north Germany, the train stopped in the late afternoon on a siding in a small town close to the old border between Germany and Poland. We were not allowed to leave the train, but a field-kitchen provided us with a warm meal and the train then continued on its way.
When it was time for sleep, we settled down in the carriage as well as we could. Since we would all have spent many a night in over-crowded trains, sleeping in the luggage-racks or on the seats of the carriage, it was no trouble to us to drop off in these positions.
It was still dark when we were woken by an NCO and we saw that the train had come to a stop in a flat area surrounded by fields. We disembarked and marched along a narrow winding road for half an hour, until we reached a group of wooden army barracks, which were to be our temporary accommodation.
We now heard that we were near the western outskirts of Warsaw. Dawn was breaking as we sat down for a bite to eat. Soon I heard the ominous rumble of distant guns opening fire. The main Front-line was about ten miles to the south-east but, as yet, I had not learned to gauge the distance of the noise of warfare. We were told that what we heard was mainly Russian artillery shooting at the Warsaw-West railway goods-station, a major unloading point for German troops and equipment.