Moments later I heard the more familiar sound of German 88-millimetre anti-aircraft guns in action and could just make out a formation of medium-sized planes attacking a ground target to the north-east. Although the gunfire sounded menacing, I was not thinking of Russians out there who could kill me, but rather felt comforted by the presence of German guns.
We had assembled in the barracks to wait for the main body of our division which was due to arrive from Italy that same evening. The division had been in action in Italy between the rivers Tiber and Arno since 15 July and was then ordered to prepare for transfer to the Russian Front. All men and their equipment, including the administration company, butchery, bakery and clothing maintenance units, had been loaded onto 72 trains bound for the Brenner Pass and then Warsaw.
We remained confined to our barracks during the morning and spent the time going over our equipment. After lunch we were divided into groups, each of which was addressed by an officer who told us what our lot was to be. All those in my group were to join self-propelled anti-aircraft batteries, mostly at the rate of one man per unit of four guns. Since we would be the most junior of each gun-crew, our job was purely menial. Training for higher-level work would be given when a suitable opportunity arose. Apart from that, it was up to each of us to adapt to the new conditions, to learn quickly and to make the best use of our training.
The batteries to which we had been assigned were expected to arrive at nightfall when they would drive straight to their designated areas. There they would dig in and camouflage their guns in readiness for action the following morning. Some hours later, trucks picked us up and drove us about 20 miles to our batteries in the Wolomin area north-east of Warsaw.
The officer in charge of my battery, Hauptmann Borchard, was in his early forties and a serious person with a somewhat curt manner. He was in charge of twelve self-propelled 20-millimetre guns, divided into three groups of four guns each. One of the gun-groups was commanded by a lieutenant, who acted as deputy battery-chief, while the three other groups were under NCOs. I was handed over to my group-chief, Haupt-Wachtmeister Henning, a friendly man in his mid-twenties, who introduced me to my immediate superior, Obergefreiter Hans Schlemm, and to the rest of the crew. Schlemm was a typical Friesian with his reticence and his pale, blond hair, but he had quite a wry sense of humour.
My main task in action was to keep up a supply of full shell-magazines for the gun-crew. Each magazine held twenty shells and could be refilled by pushing fresh shells sideways into a slot in the magazine and against the spring pressure of a receiving mechanism. Although each gun carried a quantity of spare magazines, its high firing rate of 180 to 220 rounds per minute meant that I had to refill the magazines very quickly. Apart from this, I was a general dogsbody and would have to take my turn at guard duty.
The men in my unit were all young; none were much over twenty. All were very friendly, and we used our surname and the informal “you” form when speaking to each other. The officers and NCOs used our surname and the polite “you” form.
It was now time to get some sleep, especially since I was due for guard-duty from midnight to two o’clock in the morning. The July night was pleasantly warm and I simply lay down on my ground-sheet close to the gun and covered myself with a woollen rug.
All too soon I was woken by a tug on my shoulder from the man finishing his spell of guard-duty. Since I was now sleeping in the Front-line manner, with all my clothes on, getting prepared took only seconds. Putting on my steel helmet and slinging my rifle onto my shoulder, I was ready to take over.
In the stillness of the night a strange feeling came over me while I slowly paced to and fro. What was I doing here, and could all this be true? As I contemplated the outline of the guns which I was guarding and saw the glint of moonshine reflected by their barrels, I was struck by the contrast between menacing weaponry and the tranquillity of the night.
One thing that I never overcame was my aversion to guard-duty at night-time. As a nature lover I enjoyed the stillness of the night, the silvery beams of moonshine and the shadows and outline of trees against the sky. However, the utter tedium of time dragging on and almost coming to a standstill was highly frustrating. When I did my first night-time guard-duty in Holland, which was for just an hour, I was advised not to keep looking at my watch because this only increased one’s impatience. With great willpower, I had kept my eye off my watch until I was sure the hour’s stint must be up. To my horror, only ten minutes had passed. After waiting for another “fifty minutes,” I had still covered only half-an-hour. By the time I got to the end of the full hour, I felt as if I had been up the whole night. Guard-duty on the Russian Front was always for two-hour periods, so my experience in Holland gave me a good breaking-in. Gradually I got to the stage where my estimation of time improved to the extent that, with my first glance at my watch, I had managed to get within fifteen minutes of my allotted time.
The following morning I was able to take stock of my surroundings. The battery was positioned in flat country. Further east, the terrain was slightly more elevated, but again flat without any hills or mountain ranges. Our guns were positioned about two-and-a-half feet below ground-level and surrounded on three sides by embankments of soil piled up to three feet high. Embankments and gun-carriers were camouflaged with branches and other greenery.
Our self-propelled guns were a cross between an open truck and a tank. They had ordinary road wheels at the front, but the driving force consisted of eight wheels on each side linked by caterpillar tracks, just like a tank. The gun was mounted on a steel platform behind the driver’s cab and had a low metal shield on three sides. Self-propelled guns had very good traction in soft ground and higher road speeds than tanks, while being able to operate on much lower fuel consumption. As against stationery artillery their advantage was to be able to change position rapidly and to continue firing while travelling.
Compared with the technical complexity of my 105-millimetre battery when I was a Luftwaffen-auxiliary, the situation on the Front was very different. Our 20-millimetre guns, categorised as light Flak, were mainly used against low-flying aircraft. They had a maximum ceiling of just over two thirds of a mile and a horizontal range of three miles. Special steel-piercing shells were used against armoured vehicles, and fragmentation shells against infantry. Sometimes luminous shells were used, because they could be seen in flight and gave a very good indication of how accurate the shooting was. A special sighting device was used to aim the gun. Each self-propelled gun had its own small two-wheeled trailer for transporting boxes of spare shells.
Five men were associated with each gun, the key man being the first gunner; he lined up the gun with the target and operated the firing-control. Then there was the loader, who kept feeding fresh shell-magazines into the gun-breach from the left side. The dogsbody refilled the magazines with fresh shells from ammunition-boxes as soon as they were empty. The driver of the unit normally remained in his cab, in case a fast pull-out from the position was needed and the co-driver acted as a stand-in or look-out, using binoculars to pick out approaching aircraft or other army movements.
It was not long before I experienced my first action when formations of Russian fighter-bombers appeared and swept down at a target quite close to our position. Our first-gunner, Schlemm, despite being a chunky little fellow, was amazingly agile about the gun. I was astonished at the speed with which our gun followed the movements of an aeroplane even though this had to be done manually by the operation of two handwheels. Schlemm sat on a seat attached to the gun, which was fixed to a swivelling base. With one handwheel in his right hand he could turn the gun through a full horizontal circle. He used the handwheel in his left hand to adjust the lift of the gun-barrel, which could travel through a range from pointing straight up in the air to a bit below the horizontal. The firing-mechanism was activated by a foot-pedal. Tremendous co-ordination of the gunner’s actions was needed to keep a plane in his gunsight, while accurately controlling all gun movements with his handwheels, a veritable one-man show.