As we have seen, February 1943 continued with a Russian offensive in Ukraine. It went well and the Red Army advanced many miles. Kharkov was retaken and it was there that Arno’s unit, as we saw, had to break out of an encirclement. But then the Germans, with Manstein in the forefront, launched a counterstrike. The timing was perfect. Just as Vatutin’s columns had stretched themselves too far and begun to spread out, Manstein threw his reinforcements into the fray and the Russian advance was halted in late February and early March. Once again, everything was turned around. Soon Manstein’s forces were advancing; Kharkov and Belgorod were retaken. The main job was done by the 2nd SS Panzer Corps. The 50th Regiment, to which Arno belonged, supported the renewed offensive, coming to the front by rail.
It was dramatic. As advance company to an advance battalion, Arno’s unit arrived in Kharkov on March 10, just as the SS armour reached the suburbs. Arno and his comrades disembarked and dashed straight into position outside the railway station, blasting MG fire down the streets. Then they advanced into the devastated city, driving out the Soviets and finally establishing contact with the panzers. They celebrated victory in the joyful springtime.
During these battles a remarkable thing happened. They fought over a park. The Russians retreated from it. The park was a chaos of armour, debris and fallen trees. Leading his rifle squad forward, Arno was hit by a 7.62 mm bullet.
An enemy had got him in his sights and shot him. Arno was hit on the left side of the chest. He was knocked to the muddy ground. But the bullet was stopped by a remarkable combination of things that he was carrying: a rifle sling, the shoulder strap to his Sturmgepäck and a wallet with a lot of coins. He was hit but he survived, only getting a vivid bruise on the chest where he had been struck.
After a first aider had checked that Arno was unhurt, he was able to continue to lead his squad in combat. He pondered the meaning of what had happened. He realised that it was a close shave. The bullet could easily have killed him. But he survived. He wouldn’t die in this war, this he now realised. It was such an insight that soldiers sometimes get.
He wouldn’t die. This realization disappointed him a tad. Because, to die in battle, this was surely the highlight of a warrior’s life, wasn’t it…? Few soldiers admitted it openly – but unspoken, this was a feeling many elite soldiers nourished. Knowing that they would do their utmost and then fall, in the midst of the most intense battle: O höchste Lust, O Seeligkeit…! By contrast, to fight, to live to see the peace and then go home just to fade away – this was nothing in comparison. It was like an insult.
He wouldn’t die. But the eureka moment didn’t tell him whether he would completely avoid getting hurt. He felt invulnerable after this encounter with death, but how do you go through a war without even being wounded…?
This he wondered. But he reached equilibrium later that day, the day when he was shot and survived unscathed. Resting with the squad in a backyard, waiting for orders, Arno looked up at the overcast sky, so dark it was almost purple, and said to himself: I Am.
It was the same mantra he had utilised in his pre-war existence and the one he had said before going into the combat zone in 1942. This saying always brought clarity; it always brought peace of mind: I Am.
The town was cleared and the Russians were driven out. And Manstein’s counter-offensive had succeeded. Kharkov was once more a German Stützpunkt in eastern Ukraine. The city was completely mopped up by March 15.
In the summer of this year, 1943, a further German offensive was planned. AG Süd and AG Mitte were planning a joint operation to wipe out the Russian bulge centred on the Ukrainian town of Kursk. Manstein’s plan was to attack from the south and north and to cut off the bulge. The SS Panzer Corps from AG Süd would be the southern spearhead, a Battle Group of AG Mitte the northern.
The offensive, named Unternehmen Zitadelle, began on July 5. Initially the Germans advanced some distance, especially in the South: about 30-40 km. But before the attack the Russians had taken time to strengthen the defences of the Kursk bulge. It was relatively open terrain where Russian anti-tank measures in all their forms, such as armour-demolishing patrols equipped with mines and bundle charges, anti-tank gun strongpoints, artillery and armour, were brought to bear against the attacking German armoured spearheads.
Despite the stiff opposition, the German advance continued. The 50th Regiment, for its part, was part of the German attack. It went forward as flank protection on the left flank of the southern Combat Group. Here follows Arno’s doings in the Kursk operation, a depiction of the moods, terrain and emotions, which sum up this part of his war.
July 15, 1943. The southern part of the Kursk salient, on the left flank, in the far west of the combat zone. The mission this day for Arno and his comrades was to clear a forest that lay in front of them.
The 4th Company of the 50th Regiment, 2nd battalion, had been under fire since the start of the offensive on July 5. It had forged ahead, waited, lived on the edge of villages containing corpses, booby traps and snipers, and been fed about every other day – in every way existing in the heightened awareness of combat zone reality. On July 15 this meant the same thing, the same glorified never-never-land existence, the phenomenon of Movement as a State. At ten o’clock in the morning until midday the Company moved forward in “combat triangle” formation.
They covered a kilometre, crossing successive meadows bordered by thickets of trees. It all seemed to go on forever; the soldiers moved like zombies over the unfamiliar, uneasy terrain. The sun on their necks, the moral law within and the conclusion of the war in the hazy distances ahead of them.
The advance rolled on. Arno went up in the lead, approached a thicket and found a squad of German soldiers, standing perplexed. These led him to another company commander, defender of the edge of a wood. Arno’s company took over and saw the other unit piling into trucks to be moved on to another task: taking an enemy stronghold in another piece of woodland nearby.
Arno was still head of 2nd Squad of 1st Platoon. It belonged to 4th Company of 2nd Battalion. The Company was led by a Captain Schwartz. He now grouped the Company for defence, took a sip of water from his water bottle, reported upward through his fire control radio what he had done and went into a concrete reinforced trench that happened to be there. Standing in the trench, in an observation post, he looked out over a torrid plain where operational activity was in full swing. Explosive fumes drifted over the land and Stukas made a sweep away to the west. And high up in the sky appeared the shadows of a squadron of Dornier 17s on a bombing mission, with Russian industries beyond the Urals as their target.
The ground shook with artillery impacts. Black clouds rose and drifted off in a lazy breeze. Sturmoviks appeared in the north and flew low over the plain. Anti-aircraft fire struck up from a birch grove. The Russian planes in turn fired their rockets. The woodland began to boil and smoke.
Arno watched the same scene. He was grouped with his rifle squad in scrubland overlooking the plain. What, then, did Arno know about the background to all this, about “what actually happens in what appears to happen”? Actually little; the battle rages, that was all he was thinking. He let the spectacle play itself. He concentrated on his allotted task: to protect 50 metres of this flanking position.
The sun shone intensely, throats were dry and eyes strained under the shade of helmet edges. Heat haze flickered over the ground and they heard howling armour and distant battle noise. A few crows came flapping at low altitude, lost souls in this harsh environment.