Our joviality was to disappear very quickly with the increased turbulence. Face after face lost its pink colour, slowly turning to an ill-looking white. Many rued the hasty consumption of their rat ions, which now landed undigested in hastily emptied gas-mask cases. There was nothing else available. There were no exceptions, all of us, but all of us were horribly air-sick. Busy only with ourselves, we did not notice, some time later, when our Junkers approached a landing strip with very provisional markings.
With the motors still running, we sprang from the ice-cold Junkers. I cannot impress enough how good it was to have the earth under our feet once more. Shivering with the cold, we ran through flurries of snow to a large, open hangar. There a log-fire burned in an empty oil-barrel, to warm our frozen joints. At that time, we had no clue as to where we were, only later did we learn that the airfield had the name of Orel. Shortly after, it was clear to us that the town did not lie in the south, near Dnjepr, but in the centre of the Soviet Union and on the river Oka. We had flown in a straight north-easterly course over Kiev and had landed roughly 250 kilometres from Moscow. It meant that we were not to fight with the Wiking Division, and the question was ‘why’?
The English historian, David Irving, in his research for his book on Hitler and his generals, came up with the answer to the question that we were then asking. In a tense situation caused by the bitter Russian winter, Hitler had taken over as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, from Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, just before the attack on Moscow. His orders were for fanatical resistance, and no consideration for the enemy who had broken through the flanks or at the rear. He had given the order for replacement troops to be sent from the Waffen SS and at the shortest notice possible, by air. They had to act as ‘flying firemen’ to support the troops who found themselves in a very tense and dangerous situation, in the middle sector of the front.
In his observations David Irving summed-up by saying, that in those dark months of the winter of 1941, Hitler displayed his determination, combined with the legendary strength of the German soldier, who bore every hardship. On the evening of our arrival in Orel we witnessed, from the edge of the airfield, a huge fire-ball, followed by a hefty explosion. Upon landing, a four-engined Focke-Wulf-Condor plane had crashed, killing all of the passengers, mainly Generals, but it had not been attacked.
The Junkers 52 were no luxury machines and had deficiencies, in comparison with today’s planes. There was no heating and no toilets. One of those deficiencies endangered the take-off of the Junkers that we had just used, upon its turn-around. One of our chums, in his moment of need during our flight, had used a half empty petrol canister in the rear of the plane as a pissoir, not knowing that the mixture of urine and petrol was not digestible for a Junkers, robust as it was. It gave the pilot a couple of uncomfortable minutes.
We spent the night in that hangar, with temperatures of minus thirty degrees. Our journey the next morning was in goods wagons in which we had an iron stove. We could huddle around and thaw our deeply frozen joints with the added small comfort of fresh straw covering the floor. It did not therefore take very long before we oiled our vocal cords and were singing our old songs. More than once, snowdrifts stopped our train and we had to alight and shift the snow. Those who were first to jump from the wagons unexpectedly landed in chest-high drifts. It happened more than once. So we shovelled ourselves free for the rest of the journey, from one drift to another.
CHAPTER 11
War in Winter
In the north, a bitter winter with minus 52 degrees was recorded. Such temperatures for this latitude had been known, but not for the previous 140 years. There has never been a soldier born, nor a weapon invented that could combat those extreme conditions. The result was devastating.
The Red Army used that situation and prepared a counter-offensive to stop the German army at Moscow’s doors. They thanked ‘General Winter’ for the ‘Wonder of Moscow’, as it was called, for being an eternal ally to Russia. For the first time, Josef Stalin sat in the Kremlin and enjoyed the first glimmer of hope. Till then nothing, be it weather or enemy, had managed to bring the ‘victory’ march of the Wehrmacht to a halt. In the October of 1941, ‘General Morass’ succeeded in hindering the offensive. Then the frosts of November solved the problem.
In the summer, as the German army crossed the Beresina river, a right-hand offspring of the river Dnjepr, the Soviets lost all their confidence. That river held a ‘nimbus’, a storm-cloud, i.e. a threatening portent for the Red Army, knowing that Napoleon had had very heavy losses, on his retreat in 1812. The river gave his Grande Armée an insurmountable problem. The flow of the river simply had to stop all other attempts to cross it. The German spearhead had reached the last tram-stop of the outlying districts, 18 kilometres from Moscow. Privileged Russian officials packed their cases and left. Government and diplomatic corps members were then taken to safety, behind the Volga.
Many of the population were convinced that the Wehrmacht was about to march into Moscow. There was much unrest, leading to shops and flats being looted by evacuees. Some Communist Party members even burned their party membership books. Groups of the NKVD, the People’s Commission of Internal Affairs, took a hand, shooting mutineers. They also opened the doors of the prisons.
Soviet General Georgii K. Zhukov formed militia divisions from over 100,000 members of the population, to defend Moscow. Over half a million citizens built street barriers and anti-tank trenches. The same military laws now applied to civilians, as if they were fighting on the front, with ‘panic-makers, cowards, and traitors’, being shot. There was no return.
The seizure of Moscow however, never took place. A German Communist played a decisive role in that phase of the war. He was Dr Richard Sorge, Russia’s correspondent and agent in Tokyo. He gave unquestionable information to the Kremlin, that the threatening war between Japan and the USA, in the Pacific, would prevent Japan becoming an ally of Germany. Their support with their Kwantung Army would have to be withdrawn from the Russian borders. Russia now had the use of 150 divisions and 44 brigades in readiness along the 3,000 kilometre eastern border. They were fully equipped for a Russian winter. They consisted of highly experienced Siberian and Mongolian soldiers who were considered to be Russia’s élite. We were to experience how good they were. All of that tipped the scales against us taking Moscow at that time.
Before the question was settled, we had a local attack from a ‘Red’ fighter, literally diving at us out of the high heavens. It welcomed us with a high-explosive bomb. Landing fifteen feet away, it blew half of the tar-covered roof off the railway station in which we had newly made our quarters. The side walls fell away, and no one had heard it coming. The shock was greater than the damage, with only a few of the men being slightly wounded. Our journey was by no means at an end.