As one day followed the next in the New Year, I felt as if time seemed to have suddenly slowed down. On 10 January, 1945, a major alert was declared, but it so happened that it was not in East-Prussia where the first blow fell. Two days later word went around that the Russians had attacked south of Warsaw, but we heard no further details. Everything remained quiet in my section of the Front, but on 13 January I was left in no doubt that war had also woken here from its winter sleep. At six o’clock in the morning we were put on first degree alert even as we could hear the distant thunder of guns.
My division, being held in reserve, was about fifteen miles behind the Front-lines, but I knew that our Division 2 must be suffering the full effects of the bombardment. After two hours of shelling and air strikes, the Russians attacked along the line Gumbinnen-Goldap, but the Göring Division 2, together with two extra infantry divisions placed under its command, rebuffed all attacks.
On 14 January we were given the surprising information that our division was to be loaded onto a train. This could only mean another long journey. For the second time we were being withdrawn from a critical battle area in East- Prussia and I wondered what our destination would be this time. On the evening of 16 January we drove our self-propelled guns to the town of Insterburg where we boarded a long train.
By morning we had still not arrived at our destination and I wondered how we would fare against Russian fighter-bombers in the daytime. It was our good fortune not to be attacked and by the afternoon we arrived at the city of Lodz, about 75 miles south-west of Warsaw, after travelling some 400 miles. In no time we were driving through the suburbs and then on country roads towards the town of Lancellenstätt, about twelve miles further south. That night we did not dig in, a fact for which I was grateful because it would have been a murderous job breaking up the deeply-frozen ground. Instead, we drove our guns in among some outbuildings of a farm and were able to get a comfortable night’s rest in a small barn.
The following morning, the 18 January, started quietly enough, but when daylight came I saw groups of exhausted soldiers passing through the town in a westerly direction; their uniforms torn and dirty. Every now and then lines of trucks or armoured vehicles, obviously on the retreat, passed along the road. Many of the soldiers I saw wore bandages and some walked with difficulty as their comrades supported them. The sight of such bedraggled soldiers affected me deeply and the picture of these beaten groups of men gave me a sinking feeling, which the sight of wounded men had not given me before. What must have increased my foreboding further on this occasion was that I missed a sense of purpose in our presence at Lancellenstätt. So what had gone wrong with the German defence of the Eastern Front?
The opening Russian onslaught on 12 January had been launched 120 miles south of Warsaw. A merciless bombardment by artillery spaced at an average of one heavy gun for every fifteen feet of the whole Front length was kept up against the German lines for five hours. Then the Russians advanced. A handful of already weakened German divisions faced a tenfold majority of well-equipped Russian divisions and suffered dead and wounded of up to 25% in some units.
Coming on top of expected defeats in East-Prussia, all hope was lost of holding the eastern Front between the Baltic Sea and Czechoslovakia.
The catastrophic developments exceeded all fears and Russian armies swept forward along a width of 375 miles advancing as much as 190 miles in only six days. In East-Prussia the Göring Division 2 was trapped and facing extinction. Not far from my own position 100,000 German inhabitants of the town of Lodz had already taken to the roads, grabbing only a handful of possessions.
As the hours passed on 18 January, we waited in readiness on full alert. Although I could hear plenty of action east of the town, no Russian planes came our way and my battery remained inactive while I just felt myself getting colder and colder. Lancellenstätt remained in German hands on that day, but in the afternoon shells began to hit the town and, as night fell, the noise of artillery and tank fire increased. Many buildings in the town were burning and the sight of the night spectacularly lit up by the flash from discharging gun-barrels could have been thrilling if it had not all been so deadly.
There was no sleep for us that night. Pacing around my gun and trying to keep warm as temperatures plummeted, I finally heard the order to mount up. The relief that some positive decision had been taken was tempered by the dread of maybe spending the next hours trapped on my travelling ice-box. We slowly drove out of Lancellennstätt in a north-westerly direction and then stopped in a field for the night.
We had no shelter and it was pointless to start trying to dig our holes in the frozen ground, so we prepared to sleep in the open. Four of my mates and I cleared a small area of hard snow and spread out two of our ground-sheets on it. Then we simply lay down close together, covered ourselves with our rugs and then manoeuvred our remaining three ground-sheets over the top. It was amazingly warm, cocooned as we were, and I quickly fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning presented us with a problem. Snow had fallen onto our covering ground-sheets during the night, it had melted due to the heat from our bodies and then re-frozen, forming a nicely-contoured sheet of ice that was itself frozen to the ground around us. Hardly able to move, we tried in vain to push upward. After a while I found that I was able to wriggle painfully through a narrow gap we had opened up and ran to fetch a pick-axe. Unfortunately, it was necessary to hack all around our sleeping spot, because using force to separate the ground-sheets could have split them. The other men in my battery had fared similarly and I had to smile at the bizarre sight of strangely-shaped sheets of ice being stacked on our truck because only the warmth of a fire could thaw them out again.
For breakfast we managed to get some hot coffee from a nearby field-kitchen to go with our bread. Soon we were on our way again. We drove slowly along farm tracks just north of the road to the town of Pabianice, stopping only occasionally. Our task was to guard the right flank of marching columns of soldiers and strings of motorised traffic, all on the retreat.
Suddenly, heavy fire erupted from our right as a group of well-camouflaged Russian tanks began to fire from afar with their heavy cannons and machine-guns. The immediate effect was disastrous. Shells slammed into vehicles, causing some of them to burst into flames, while raking machine-gun fire hit marching soldiers. Our guns were already loaded with anti-tank shells and within seconds we were firing back at an enemy we could barely see. By this time German tanks accompanying the columns had swung off the road and opened fire on the Russians tanks. My battery emerged unscathed from the conflict, but we had to wait some time while the dead and wounded in other units were attended to and supplies and equipment had been transferred from damaged vehicles to those which were still operational.
Later that day we arrived at Pabianice, one of the many towns in the west of Poland with a sizeable population of Germans or people of German extraction. Gangs of Poles had been on the rampage murdering German civilians, looting houses and setting them on fire. We stayed the night in houses on the outskirts of the abandoned town and were able to light stoves to warm ourselves and thaw out our frozen ground sheets.
The following day our first destination was the town of Lask, about fifteen miles west of Pabianice. We soon had to leave the road, because it was cut off by Russian tank formations and we had to conserve our ammunition as far as possible. We had begun to run low and, for the first time, were not sure when fresh supplies would reach us. Keeping mainly to snowed-over farm tracks we travelled north-west, but had to change direction a few times when despatch riders told us of heavy Russian armour ahead.