Hitler's Vikings Page 20
Then the Russians attacked again, and all the wounded who could walk were told to man their positions again. Those of us remaining were left behind to fend for ourselves as best we could. We were given some grenades and machine-pistols and wished ‘Good luck’. We fully understood. More than a dozen men would have been needed to carry us away, and they couldn’t be spared.
The Russians appeared and shot at us – we shot back. They threw hand-grenades and we replied. Fortunately the Wehrmacht counter-attacked with the support of some light tanks. We did not lose a single wounded man, although some of us, including me, collected a few more wounds, though nothing serious. I was then taken by stretcher again to a bunker. It was deep, with a well-protected entrance and a very thick roof. Inside were tables and easy chairs. A radio was playing, and it looked almost like something from a propaganda picture. A doctor examined me and said: ‘When did you last have a piss?’ As far as I could remember that was noon the previous day, a good 17 hours before. Before I knew what was happening I had a catheter inserted. I didn’t feel a thing, though the doctor was pleased that he had done it in time.
During and after the German counter-attack several Russian prisoners were taken. These were used, as usual, for carrying ammunition and, on this occasion, to carry the stretchers. To go back to the dressing station we had to cross a rather bare, flat field. The Russians were directing some artillery fire on this area and every time a shell landed the Russian carrying the foot of the stretcher I was on would drop it and take cover. The one at the head end was more careful and lowered me gently. By this time I had a splitting headache and all the dropping wasn’t helping. I told the one holding my feet that if he dropped me again I would shoot him. I had to warn him twice more. After each warning he would initially lower his end, but soon went back to just dropping me. Eventually I got my pistol out and fired a shot over his head. Everything went fine after that.
The long road to capitulation
The failure of the Wehrmacht to land a knock-out blow on the Red Army in 1943 condemned Nazi Germany and its allies to eventual, bloody defeat. Germany was only ever geared up for a short war and the battle of attrition it was now facing in the West and East was one it could never hope to win. It was rapidly losing the vital armaments production race and was starting to get very near the bottom of the manpower barrel. By contrast, its opponents were really starting to come into their own. The Ostheer had managed to kill and capture Soviet soldiers at a ratio of almost five to one in 1941; that had now reduced to two to one. The old-style lumbering masses of the Red Army, herded mindlessly onto Wehrmacht guns or into Wehrmacht prison camps, had been replaced by a behemoth that was now not only more mobile than the Ostheer, but was equipped with firepower on an unheard-of scale. The future looked bleak for the Wehrmacht.
As for the Waffen-SS, it had finally addressed its shortcomings regarding the treatment of its foreign volunteers. Consequently their training and military effectiveness had come on in leaps and bounds, and they were now an established and valued part of the growing Waffen-SS world. For the Scandinavian Waffen-SS this had meant the establishment of their own division. The Nordland had drawn together the bulk of the Nordics in the black guards, but it had failed in its purpose. The Finns had gone home en masse and many volunteers were still spread across half a dozen formations, most notably the Wiking, the SS-Ski Battalion Norge and the SS-Police Companies. But the Nordland as a gesture had failed. There was no new avalanche of recruits and thousands of Balkan volksdeutsche had had to fill the gaps. With the war clearly turning against Nazi Germany, there would be even fewer willing to take the plunge – from now on the Scandinavian Waffen-SS would only get smaller.
The Nordland may have failed in mass recruiting but it had succeeded in concentrating the cream of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS in a new, powerful force equipped with panzers, assault guns, self-propelled artillery, armoured cars and armoured personnel carriers. Their military proficiency was recognised not only in their equipment tables, but also in their growing prominence in technical arms and most importantly, in command positions. Across the new division, hundreds of corporals, sergeants, platoon, company and even battalion commanders could speak Danish, Norwegian or Swedish together and talk of home. Together they would defend the Third Reich back to the very gates of Hitler’s bunker itself, 18 months later.
V
1944: Bled White in the East – the Wiking at
Cherkassy and the Nordland at Narva
The time for grand-style operations in the East is now past.
Adolf Hitler to Erich von Manstein after sacking him as Army Group South’s commander in March 1944.
Since the launch of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht had lost just over 3,000,000 men killed, wounded or missing in the East. In effect, this was the entire strength of the original invasion force. True, the Ostheer still stood at a total of 140 infantry, 24 panzer, nine panzer grenadier and 36 allied divisions (16 Finnish, nine each from Rumania and Hungary, and one each from Slovakia and Spain), but this was not the magnificent war machine of 1941. The infantry divisions lacked men, while the panzer units would never fully recover from Kursk. Equipment, like the new Panther and Tiger tanks, was undoubtedly of excellent quality in terms of firepower, but the tanks were unreliable, and fuel was in short supply as Allied Bomber Command systematically destroyed Germany’s synthetic gasoline production. The Germans were becoming increasingly reliant on horses and boot leather to move around. The men themselves were not the same either. The incredibly well-drilled officers, NCOs and men of the 1941 Wehrmacht were long gone, buried under Russian soil across hundreds of battlefields. In their place were often hastily-trained conscripts, eager just to survive the war. Germany’s greatest strategist of the day, Erich von Manstein, said that the Army’s divisions had been burnt out beyond repair.
While the Wehrmacht was now a shadow of its former self, facing it was a Red Army well on its way to becoming the dominant military force on the planet. Even after its millions of casualties, its strength had actually risen to 5,989,000 men in the army, 480,000 in the air force and 260,000 in the navy (mainly used as ground troops) – 6,729,000 men all up. The Soviets fielded 5,600 tanks and assault guns, 8,800 aircraft and a jaw-dropping 90,000 artillery pieces. The thousands of sturdy, American-made, Lend Lease trucks provided real mobility, while the factories and plants poured out munitions and fuel on a prodigious scale to drive it all forward.
This was what faced the Scandinavian Waffen-SS of the Nordland and Wiking at the dawn of the new year. For the Nordland it would bring a first taste of action, while for the Wiking it was a third year of struggle. For both, the year would always be remembered for two of the great battles of the Russo-German war – the Narva and the Cherkassy Pocket.
Oranienbaum
The Oranienbaum Pocket, to the west of Leningrad on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, was centred on the powerful Soviet naval base of Kronstadt, and surrounded by the flat and swampy Ingermannland. A thorn in Army Group North’s side since their failure to overwhelm it back in 1941, the area had served as a staging post for Soviet attacks ever since. The Norwegians of the DNL had fought off just such an assault at Urizk in 1942. Since then depressingly little had changed in the northern sector of the Russian Front. Leningrad was still holding out, the Finns had not moved, and the Red Army was still launching offensives from the Volkhov River and the Valdai Hills to try and relieve the beleaguered city. Neither side had been strong enough to defeat the other; and both were pre-occupied with far grander battles farther south. Thousands had still died though, in brutal infantry fights and artillery duels among the forests, low hills and marshland. The front was now approaching a turning point as the Red Army grew in strength and the Ostheer’s combat power ebbed away into the snow and mud.
Anticipating a series of Russian winter offensives up and down the frontline, any available troops across Europe were transferred east by the OKW. Among those sent to Russia were Steiner’s III Germanic SS-Panzer C
orps. Allocated to the Oranienbaum sector, as part of General Georg Lindemann’s Eighteenth Army, the Corps arrived in the last weeks of November and the first half of December. It also took under command a battlegroup of the SS-Polizei division, and two weak Luftwaffe Field Divisions, the 9th and 10th. These latter were not élite paratroopers, but mainly unemployed ground crew whom Goering had grouped in formations still under his arm’s nominal command. Rather than train them properly and then send them as much-needed replacements to tried and tested Army units, which would at least have given them a fighting chance of survival, an increasingly drug-dependent Goering had left them semi-trained and poorly equipped and led by officers with little if any combat experience. The exceptions to this latter rule were the divisional commanders of the 9th and 10th, Colonel (Oberst) Ernst Michael and Major General (Generalmajor) Hermann von Wedel respectively. Both men were professional officers and holders of the German Cross in Gold and the Knight’s Cross. Both would die in the coming battle. Despite the presence of these two gallant officers Steiner was not happy with his Luftwaffe charges, but needs must, so he set about positioning his troops as best he could. He placed the Luftwaffe troops to the east to soak up any attack, with the Nederland farther west, and the Nordland holding the south of the salient in depth and providing some sort of reserve. Unfortunately his most powerful armoured unit – the Nordland’s Hermann von Salza Panzer Battalion – was still marrying up with its Panther tanks and carrying out necessary familiarisation training, it would not rejoin the division for some time.
Coincidentally, the very first Frikorps Danmark commander, Christian Peder Kryssing, was stationed just to the east of the Corps as commander of Battlegroup Coast (Kampfgruppe Küste), a collection of naval, army and coastal defence units totalling 9,000 men. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer on 1 August 1943, Kryssing’s battlegroup was almost as strong as the Nordland, with von Scholz’s Christmas strength return reporting 341 officers, 1,975 NCOs, 10,146 men, and 106 Hiwis – 12,568 men. This put it almost exactly 2,500 under establishment, with half of the shortfall being officers and NCOs.
The Red Army’s winter offensive
Just as in 1942 and 1943, the STAVKA had decided to launch a winter offensive against the Germans in the north of Russia. But whereas those attacks had been met by resolute defence and beaten back, this was a different time.
At 0700hrs on the morning of 14 January 1944, huge concentrations of Soviet artillery began pounding the German lines around Oranienbaum. Even as the guns shifted their fire to deeper targets, the assault troops of the Red Army’s 2nd Shock Army downed their hefty ration of vodka and threw themselves forward with their customary ‘Urrahs!’ Their attack was aimed squarely at the Luftwaffe divisions and, despite their commanders’ best efforts, the air force men were simply swept away by an enemy that outnumbered them by more than four to one. Michael’s 9th Division was even attacked from behind, as the Soviet 42nd Army broke through the Army’s neighbouring 126th Infantry Division and swung into the rear. The Nordland was immediately thrown into combat to try and stem the tide as the Germans attempted to rebuild a line to the south running northwest from the coast, down to the southeast below Leningrad. For an entire week von Scholz’s men were Steiner’s ‘fire brigade’, constantly switching battalions to halt Soviet breakthroughs and seal up holes in the line. The fighting was bitter, Fritz Bunse’s SS-Assault Engineer Battalion (SS-Pionier Bataillon 11) lost 100 men killed and wounded in just one day’s combat near the village of Malkunova. The DNL veteran John Sandstadt, now serving in the Norge’s 1st Battalion, recalled that time:
On the day of the major Soviet attack our company (the 1st) had a strength of 118 men: seven reichsdeutsche NCOs, 34 volksdeutsche soldiers, 1 Flemish Unterscharführer and 76 Norwegians (the largest number in the battalion) with two officers, 15 NCOs and 59 men.
On the night of January 15, 1944, the first enemy movement took place, and our counter-attack in the morning completely collapsed under Soviet crossfire. We immediately lost 13 dead and many wounded. It was the same for the 2nd and 3rd Companies. All the same we were finally able to hold our positions for some ten days, with our three companies reduced to the strength of just one company.
My brother Olav, born in 1921, had also enlisted in the DNL on April 28 1943 and served in the heavy platoon of our company. He fell in the Kosherizy area after five days. His last resting place was in the former divisional cemetery near Begunizy, between St Petersburg and Narva.
When we had some rest on January 27 1944, our company consisted of one Obersturmführer, 5 NCOs and some 35 men. Our Battalion Commander, Fritz Vogt, appeared and handed several soldiers – including me – the Iron Cross 2nd Class. Less as a recognition for brave deeds, but more as a ‘premium’ for having survived the previous 12 days.
In the end there was nothing else for it – Army Group North would have to retreat. Abandoning the positions they had held for more than two years, the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies were more or less bundled back southwest to rudimentary positions on the Luga River, rather grandiosely called the ‘Panther Line’. As the Eighteenth Army headed back west, an eerie silence hung over the miles and miles of trenches that had been home to so many soldiers for so long. Then, in an outpouring of joy, the citizens of Leningrad realised they were free at last and every bell in the city tolled. The longest continuous siege in the history of warfare was finally over. The city was safe but the fighting continued, with surviving enclaves of the Luftwaffe’s 9th Division and the Army’s 126th Division lying surrounded to the southwest near Ropsha, and in danger of being left behind. The Nordland lunged forward and broke them out in a last offensive effort, before streaming back to the relative safety of the river defences. Without the panzers of the Hermann von Salza, the Nordland’s most powerful armoured component was Rudi Saalbach’s far more lightly equipped Armoured Recce Battalion with its volksdeutsche recruits and Swedish veterans. Increasingly used as a rearguard, the battalion held Gubianzy covering the division’s withdrawal to the Luga crossing point at Jamburg (also called Kingisepp). Nilsson’s Schwedenzug especially was involved in bitter fighting, and was decimated at Volossovo and Orlovo. A Soviet night attack in the area on 26 January was crushed by Saalbach’s men, leaving 34 Red Army tanks burning in the snow. The young Dutch volunteer, Kaspar Sporck, distinguished himself while commanding a troop of half-tracks fitted with 75mm anti-tank guns. The Recce Battalion volunteer, Toni Ging, remembered the withdrawal:
I was trained as a driver and given an SPW with a turret and a 2cm cannon, the commander was an SS-Rottenführer and the gunner was a Swedish comrade, unfortunately I have forgotten both their names.
We were near Volossovo and were assigned to recce a village. We were accompanied by an SWP with panzer grenadiers. Since no enemies were to be seen, the other SPW went back and I turned to go back also. Scarcely were the grenadiers at our level when we came under heavy infantry fire from the village. I drove into a heap of stones, which had been hidden under the snow, and thus got stuck. The fire got heavier and heavier and we had to leave the vehicle. First the commander up in the turret, then the Swede, and then me. Ducking down we ran to the other SPW which was waiting for us. But before we arrived the Swede was hit. We crept to him and pulled him into the SPW. We went to the main dressing station but unfortunately our Swedish comrade died of his wound. Our 3rd Company still had a fighting strength of 25 men at that time.
Reaching Jamburg the Nordland safely crossed to the western bank of the Luga, but it was too late. The Red Army, in a clear sign of its growing mechanization, had actually reached the river to the north and south of Jamburg before a lot of the retreating Germans. The river was now useless as a defensive barrier, and the retreat had to continue back west to the old Estonian/Russian border at the River Narva. Meanwhile the Norge held onto the eastern bank of the Luga while much of Army Group North crossed over, with the 1st Battalion and its Norwegian component bearing the brunt of the rearguard fighting.
Th
e Narva – the Battle of the European SS
At last the German retreat outpaced the Soviet advance, and the Narva was reached by the Nordland in early February. Von Scholz gathered his dispersed troopers and threw them into a hasty defensive line based on the river and the cities of Narva and Ivangorod on the east and west banks. The battered Norge crossed to the west bank and took up position in the swamps to the southwest of Narva city itself. This time it was the Danmark and Nederland that stayed on the eastern bank to form a bridgehead. The Soviets were just days behind, and no sooner had the Corps dug in than the Red Army stormed across the river to the south and tried to cut them off from the rear. Again the Norge bore the brunt of the fighting, it managed to pin them back into two pockets with their backs to the water – the Ostsack and Westsack – but it was not strong enough to throw them back over the river. The Norge lost its highly decorated commander, Arnold Stoffers, who died while personally leading an assault, plus two of its three battalion commanders; Hans-Heinrich Lohmann who was seriously wounded, and Albrecht Krügel who went to take over at Danmark when Graf Hermenegild von Westphalen was killed.