At the time I joined my transport unit, the western Allies had reached several points on the river Rhine, but we knew nothing of this. On the northern part of the eastern Front the Russians had reached East-Pommerania, while Berlin was being subjected to round-the-clock air-raids. We could see for ourselves that things were not good on the Russian Front, but all that mattered to us was keeping our troops supplied. There was no alternative anyway; we could not all go home and let the Russians sweep over Germany; I certainly did not want to be taken prisoner and I looked on each day on which we held off the Russians and maintained an intact Front-line as a positive achievement.
As a result of German resistance, the Russian forces were making no headway. In the section defended by the 4th Panzer Army, to which my division belonged, stability was achieved in the early days of March. Other divisions from Army-Group Middle successfully defended the Front-lines right down to the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. As a result of this concerted stand, streams of refugees managed to make good progress on their trek to the west. The tenacity with which German soldiers were defending home soil against enormous odds was something the Russians had not expected. Between the Baltic Sea and the Slovakian border there was nothing more than three worn out and ravaged German armies opposing twenty-eight fully equipped Russian armies and fourteen army- corps.
It was at this time that I got my one and only war injury, but I cannot claim to have suffered it in heroic battle. We had made use of a relatively slack period to build up a sizeable dump of assorted ammunition at our base, by ferrying several loads from a main depot. Our dump was inside the edge of a wood bordering on a small village and we maintained a continuous guard on it.
One beautiful, sunny day I was standing guard at the dump. It was close to mid-day and all the world seemed at peace, there was even a touch of spring in the air. Suddenly, I was startled to see white smoke rising up between the cases at one end of the dump. My immediate guess was that a piece of glass had caught the strong rays of the sun and was igniting dry grass and leaves. There was a village pump only a hundred yards away which always had a bucket beside it, so I raced to it and began to fill the bucket while shouting to one of my mates that there was a fire at the dump. When I got back the smoke had become a lot denser and so, without hesitation, I emptied the bucket over a spot that was the obvious source of the fire.
The next instant I felt an agonising pain all over my face as if it had been hit by a wall of flame while simultaneously it seemed that a red hot poker had pierced the top of my left foot. Looking down I saw that the top of the boot and the lacing had dissolved. I instinctively lashed out with my left foot to kick off the boot and shake off the foot cloth even as I started racing to the village.
My eyes were burning and I could hardly see where I was going, but I felt a reassuring grip on my arm from my mate who had seen what happened and knew I was badly hurt. Steering me as if I was a galloping blind-man, my mate brought me to a medical orderly in the town. He immediately told me to get my trousers off in a hurry and only then did I hazily see that the bottom half of my left trouser leg was reduced to shreds. In next to no time the orderly had bathed my eyes and smeared ointment all over my face, my left foot and parts of my leg and he then swathed all affected areas in bandages. That was all that could be done for me at the moment, but I experienced no relief and felt as if my whole face and left foot were on fire. The orderly told me to report to the Oberfeldwebel and then to lie down and rest; he would come and visit me shortly. So off I went. My head was a mass of bandages with only slits left for me to see through and my injured foot and leg were likewise bandaged up. The poor Oberfeldwebel got a terrible shock when he saw me with my huge, white, pumpkin-like head. I quickly gave him my report and he ordered me to rest immediately and not to worry about anything.
When the orderly visited me a short while later he told me what had happened. The explanation turned out to be quite simple. For once I had suffered an extraordinary bit of bad luck. For some unknown reason, one of the wicker cases contained canisters of a smoke-generating solution. This solution only remained in its liquid state as long as it was in a sealed container, but once it made contact with air it turned into dense smoke.
It seemed that one of the containers must have been faulty and suddenly developed a heavy leak of fluid which formed a pool in the grass and began to give off smoke. Throwing water on the pool had a similar effect to throwing water on a pan of boiling fat, it immediately vaporised and shot explosively in all directions. It was mostly light vapour that had hit my face, whereas the larger and heavier droplets had bespattered my left boot and trouser leg. Since the solution was highly acidic, the corrosive effect of it hitting parts of my body or my clothing was devastating.
In the midst of my bad luck I had still been extremely fortunate. One droplet had burned a deep hole above my left eyebrow and others produced a few minor craters in my face, but none had hit my eyes otherwise I would have been instantly blind. Some light vapour must have struck my eyes because of the searing pain I felt, but the natural eye fluids had given me enough protection, since I did not suffer any long term effects. I still have some of the burn marks on my face, but they are almost invisible. My face healed up reasonably well in a week and was then no longer painful, but my foot troubled me for many weeks to come. The acid had burned right through to the bone at one spot near my big toe and this obstinately refused to heal over.
It was two weeks before I could do any heavy work, so I was put adjusting cases on the stockpiles where very little walking was required. A week later, though not fully recovered, I was back on full work, but paid the price of having to endure a much longer healing period than I would otherwise have had. Strangely enough, despite the severity of the foot injury, no scar has remained to tell the tale. Painful as my single war wound was, I still think I was amazingly lucky that the outcome was not more serious.
The front-line situation continued to improve and by 6 April further stability was achieved. Though German forces were retreating all along the line, at least the fighting Front remained intact and there was no break-through by Russian forces. After a short while, a phased pull-back over forty-five miles to the west was carried out by my division. The troops were to get a badly needed rest and casualties were to be replaced by soldiers from reserve units. Since depletion of soldiers in some units had gone beyond a critical stage, the units had to be dissolved and new units created from the survivors.
While my Division 1 had been defending Silesia and suffering heavy casualties, our sister division in East-Prussia fared much worse. Short of food and with guns rationed to a ludicrous eight rounds per day their casualties mounted. Losses in some units reached sixty-three per cent between January and the end of March; a terrible toll of human life mixed with suffering. At this stage, what was left of the Göring Division 2 was withdrawn by sea and sent to join the Division 1 in Silesia.
One of the most dastardly orders given to army commanders was that large or important towns be designated a “fortress”, i.e. given a military status. Even as late as 12 April 1945, the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, made up of Hitler’s henchmen Keitel, Himmler and Bormann, directed that any town commander of a “fortress” who surrendered or retreated without express permission would be sentenced to death. Declaring a town a “fortress” invariably spelt death and rape to many civilians, apart from the pointless sacrifice of troops and equipment. Many such orders were given when the war was almost over, which just goes to show the stupidity, blindness and irresponsibility of which human minds are capable.