Hitler's Vikings Page 21

  With the line somewhat stabilised, both Steiner’s Corps and Kryssing’s battlegroup were grouped together with Knight’s Cross winner General Anton Grasser’s XXVI Infantry Corps, to form the new Army Group Narva. Kryssing’s force had to fend off an amphibious assault on the night of 13 February as Soviet marines stormed ashore at the town of Merekuela. Assisted by the Nordland, Kryssing’s men held and the landing was thrown back into the sea. Steiner’s command was then given a real boost by the arrival of the newly formed 20th SS-Estonian Division (20th Waffen-Grenadier Division der SS estnische Nr.1). The Estonians were almost all former members of various Schuma Battalions (militia and self-defence units set up and organised by the Wehrmacht from local volunteers, mainly to combat the partisan threat.), or the Wiking’s own Estonian Narwa Battalion and its Waffen-SS Estonian Legion brethren. As such the majority were combat veterans eager to defend their homeland against the advancing Red Army. They were immediately caught up in the fighting, but it was clear that the Soviet advance was finally running out of steam after six weeks of action. That did not mean the fighting stopped. The Red Army was strong enough to be able to rest large parts of its order of battle while still feeding in fresh formations to keep up the pressure on the Narva. Using the Ostsack and Westsack as jumping off points, the Soviet 8th Army tried again to cut the main Narva-Reval road and isolate the Corps. The whole of March was taken up by this see-saw fighting as the Germans attempted to smash the pockets and restore the river line, even as the Russians sought to expand their bridgeheads. One such Red Army thrust threatened to split the Nordland from its southern Army neighbour, the 11th Infantry Division, and the two divisions had to launch no less than three co-ordinated counter-attacks along with Heavy Tank Battalion 502 (Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502 – an Army unit equipped with hugely powerful Tiger tanks) to finally smash the Westsack on 30 March. The Norwegian volunteer SS-Untersturmführer Kare Brynestad won the Iron Cross 1st Class for his bravery during the fighting. There was no such success against the Ostsack though, as it continued to hold out.

  Johan-Petter Balstad, born 24 September 1924 in Norway, was an officer candidate in the Norge Regiment’s 7th Company during the ‘Battle of the European SS’ at Narva in 1944. He became an expert at destroying Soviet T-34 tanks with hand-held panzerfausts, hence his three tank killer badges on his right upper arm. He survived the war and passed away in Oslo in 1985. (James Macleod)

  The Narva battleground today. This view shows the Danmark Regiment’s positions east and south of Orphanage Hill towards Auwere, specifically the ground held by the then-depleted 2nd and 3rd Battalions. (Paul Errington)

  The Narva battleground today. The rebuilt fortress stands on the western bank and the photograph shows the Danmark Regiment’s bridgehead on the eastern bank. (Paul Errington)

  Eventually the spring thaw brought a temporary halt to large-scale operations as the low-lying land of the area became waterlogged and impassable for vehicles. Even though their trenches were now full of water, the surviving Scandinavians of the Nordland breathed a huge sigh of relief. The Corps could now take stock and lick its wounds. Casualties had been extremely heavy. The Nordland’s baptism of fire had cost it a third of its total strength, with 24 officers and 788 men killed, 58 officers and 2,708 men wounded, and nine officers and 216 men missing. Only nine Hiwis survived the retreat. The Nordland was not exceptional. The Nederland, for instance, had lost an astonishing 3,300 men, some 60 per cent of its strength, while Eighteenth Army as a whole suffered 20,000 casualties in the first two weeks of the offensive alone. The race was now on to try and plug the gaps before the Red Army renewed its offensive; von Scholz had some real concerns about the combat value of his division as it strove to recover, which he detailed in a report to Berlin:

  The Swedish volunteer and war reporter Sten Eriksson, during a lull in the fighting at Narva, looks across the river from the west bank towards the imposing Russian Ivangorod fortress. (James Macleod)

  The fighting value of the Division was decisively influenced by high losses of officers and NCOs, which is all the more serious because of the few officers and NCOs available when it was established. In the composition of the Division (Germanic volunteers from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the south-eastern area) the fighting value rises or falls depending on the elimination of this shortage.

  The meagre motorised capability (25% of the full vehicle numbers) along with the available weapons and equipment on hand at formation, has in the withdrawal led, despite the highest discipline, to drive the men to the borders of their physical limits and to extraordinarily high weapon and equipment losses.

  The training level of the replacements arriving has not allowed their inclusion in the Division as frontline troops. Further training with the Replacement Battalion (four to six weeks) has been necessary. However the physical condition and morale of the replacements is good. The mood of the troops is good, even though political developments in Denmark and Norway have had a negative effect on the Germanic volunteers from those countries.

  Until sufficient filling out with capable officers and NCOs, the Division has only limited capability for defence.

  Hans-Gösta Pehrsson, the most decorated Swedish SS volunteer of the war at Mummasaara in Estonia in April 1944. (Lennart Westberg)

  As for equipment, at the end of March the Corps’ armoured punch was badly lacking, with the Nordland only mustering a negligible 10 assault guns, and the Nederland about the same. Von Scholz did manage to grab some 710 men from the now-defunct 9th and 10th Luftwaffe Field Divisions, which were unsurprisingly disbanded. The new men were given Waffen-SS camouflage smocks and distributed around the 2nd and 3rd Norge and Danmark Battalions. The 1st Battalions of each of the Nordland’s two grenadier regiments were also broken up, having suffered crippling casualties. The majority of survivors were used to help fill the ranks of their sister battalions, while a cadre was sent to the Hammerstein training area, back in the Reich, to take on new recruits and ready themselves for a return to the division. As it turned out they never rejoined their comrades. By the time they were in any sort of shape to fight again, Nazi Germany was in a spiral of increasing chaos, and they were sent to reinforce the Wiking instead. Without them the Nordland would become, in effect, a model of the Wehrmacht 1945-pattern division with only four grenadier battalions and not the previous six. In those reduced four battalions there were still 1,089 Danes including 37 officers, but only 338 Norwegians (21 officers), as volunteers drained away to the Finnish front. As for the Schwedenzug, Walter Nilsson had been killed at Rogowitzky on 25 January during the retreat and was replaced by his fellow Swede, Hans-Gösta Pehrsson – an old-stager affectionately known as ‘GP’ by his men. Transferred to Mummassaara in the rear, the Schwedenzug was reinforced and re-equipped in preparation for the battles to come.

  The Wiking at Cherkassy

  By mid-December 1943 the Ostheer had been pushed back west from the mighty Dnieper River along its entire length – except for a short stretch, near the city of Cherkassy, centred on the town of Korsun. Two and a half years earlier the Wiking, in its first major operation of the war, had charged through exactly the same area as it raced to cross the Dnieper and head ever eastwards during the heady days of Operation Barbarossa. Then the division had been, numerically, the strongest formation in the whole Waffen-SS, and was the standard bearer of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS with hundreds of Germanic volunteers filling its ranks. By late December 1943 the Wiking was a very different division. It was now one of the Wehrmacht’s 30 fully-fledged panzer divisions with the Wiking old boy, Hans Mühlenkamp, in charge of an entire regiment of panzers (although only one battalion was present at the time), and it had earned a superb reputation for military efficiency and combat élan. As part of the reorganisation of the Waffen-SS in 1943 it also had one of the new SS-Assault Brigades grouped under it to provide extra combat power, in the Wiking’s case it was the Walloon Belgian 5th SS-Volunteer Assault Brigade Wallonien (5. SS-Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade
Wallonien) commanded by the ex-regular Belgian Army officer Lucien Lippert. Along with the Nederland and the Wallonien, two more brigades were created, the French SS-Frankreich serving with the Hungarian volksdeutsche SS-Horst Wessel Division and the Flemish SS-Langemarck with Das Reich.

  Felix Steiner had moved up to Corps command of course, but in his place was the Wiking’s previous head of artillery, the highly decorated and extremely experienced SS-Brigadeführer Herbert Otto Gille. Gille was tall, bespectacled, silver-haired and immensely respected by his men. Some of his Army commanders questioned his tactical skill at divisional level, but none doubted his bravery. The division, though, was not the multi-national force it had once been. Most of the Scandinavians and Dutchmen had been combed out the previous year to fill the Nordland and Nederland and their places taken by native Germans. Even so, there were still well over a thousand foreign volunteers scattered across the unit, with several hundred Scandinavians prominent among them. The Wiking was no longer the totem of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS, but nevertheless its story is still part of their story.

  Wiking grenadiers and some of the division’s few Mark IV panzers advance across the desolate Ukrainian plain at Cherkassy, 1944.

  A tired Norwegian Wiking NCO well kitted out for the cold of Cherkassy, 1944.

  Herbert Otto Gille – initially Wiking’s artillery commander, then overall divisional commander and finally IV SS Corps commander – with his trusty walking stick.

  A Wiking Mark IV panzer at Cherkassy. The Mark IV was outdated by the time of the battle but was still the workhorse of the German panzer formations. This one sports wide armour skirts to counter anti-tank shells.

  Another Stalingrad? The December offensive

  ‘No respite for the Fritzies’, was the new clarion call from the STAVKA. The Red Army was well on the way to mastering all the technical arts of a modern military machine and had unprecedented resources. Their doctrine now emphasised a never-ending series of attacks and offensives, up and down the frontline, maintaining the initiative and never allowing the Ostheer either to recover its strength or effectively switch forces from sector to sector. Hitler’s stubborn insistence on holding the line on the Dnieper, with a view to a wholly improbable future German offensive, presented the Soviets with a golden opportunity to trap a large part of Army Group South against the river. The STAVKA eyed the multiplicity of formations on the Dnieper, XI and XLII Corps from Hans Valentin Hube’s First Panzer Army and Otto Wöhler’s Eighth Army respectively, with barely concealed glee. Surely here was the opportunity for another Stalingrad? For once however, Soviet intelligence was off-beam. The order of battle for the two Corps might have looked impressive on paper, but in reality they were phantoms. Colonel Schmidt of the Bavarian 57th Infantry Division (part of XI Corps) said of his division at the time:

  The division’s fighting strength has been weakened by the months-long battle against an enemy superior in men and material. The infantry battalions are only at 20 to 30 per cent strength. Fighting morale has sunk. Within the unit is an apathetic indifference. The troops have been living under conditions in which the most primitive essentials of life have been lacking … harsh words of embitterment and lack of faith in the High Command are voiced by the troops.

  Only the Wiking (again part of XI Corps) was still at anything approaching full-strength, and it was down to 14,000 men. Most significantly, with Hans Mühlenkamp absent reforming a second armoured battalion, the division’s panzer component was just 25 Panzer IVs, a dozen obsolete Panzer IIIs, and six assault guns led by Hans Köller. The Soviet plan envisaged an encirclement trapping more than 100,000 Germans, as it turned out the number would be more like 56,000.

  Following the by-now usual thorough Soviet preparations, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts launched an all-out offensive on Christmas Eve 1943 from Ovruch in the north, all the way down to Zaphorozye in the south. Some 29,000 artillery guns and 2,360 aircraft pulverised the German frontlines, paving the way for 2,365,000 men to throw themselves at the shelled units of Army Group South and its 1,760,000 troopers. Within days the Front had disintegrated and over 2,000 Russian tanks poured through to cause chaos and effect a link-up behind the Wiking and its fellow formations.

  The Wiking and two Corps are trapped

  By 28 January the men of the 6th Tank Army and the 5th Guards Tank Army shook hands at the village of Zvenigorodka on the little Gniloy Tikich River (pronounced ‘neeloy teekitsch’), and the Wiking was surrounded. It joined its comrades in the Wallonien, and a half-dozen Army infantry divisions, now officially entitled Group Stemmermann after the most senior commander present, General of Artillery Wilhelm Stemmermann.

  Moving with commendable speed, Koniev and Vatutin’s men established two rings between the Pocket (Kessel in German), and the main German lines. The outer would face any relief attempt, while the inner would frustrate any possible breakout. Simultaneously the 27th and 52nd Armies attacked the encircled landsers and SS grenadiers from east and west to smash the Pocket apart, amply supported by massed artillery, which worked backward and forward over the diminishing terrain still in German and allied hands. In frightening echoes of Stalingrad a year earlier, Hitler forbade Stemmermann from any breakout and instead insisted on a relief column advancing and reaching them. The Nazi dictator would simply not give up his last toehold on the Dnieper. Erich von Manstein, in charge of Army Group South, launched a hasty two-pronged attack on 1 February with the majority of five panzer divisions involved (his entire Army Group only fielded nine including the Wiking). Two years before, such a force would have shaken the Soviets to their core, but now they could counter the assault with no fewer than six tank corps, one mechanised corps and four infantry corps of their own. The attack was halted in a week, even as the Wiking and the Wallonien were being roughly pushed off the Dnieper. The Walloon veteran, SS-Standartenoberjunker Raymond Lemaire had only just rejoined his unit after specialist assault pioneer training in Dresden:

  We pioneers had to occupy some of the infantry positions to maintain the line. After numerous actions and battles, I was the only NCO left in my platoon. The Soviets attacked our sector again on 30 January, but in two hours of hand-to-hand and close-quarter fighting we managed to beat them off. However, I was seriously wounded by grenade splinters in both legs in the process. Being unable to walk after a few hours I was evacuated by plane out of the Pocket.

  Lemaire was one of the lucky ones; of his 2,000 comrades only 632 would eventually walk out alive from the Pocket. The Wiking’s Scandinavians fared little better. Still concentrated in the grenadier companies, especially in the Germania, dozens of the remaining Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were killed or wounded in the constant Soviet assaults. It wasn’t just the fighting that was bitter either, the weather was horrendous. All veterans remark on it. The open Ukrainian steppe was swept by freezing winds and blizzards that saw the thermometer plunge to twenty degrees C below zero. Just as at Demyansk, two years before, the Red air force tried to flatten every building to deny the trapped men any shelter. Again, just as at Demyansk, the crews of the Luftwaffe’s overworked transport fleet landed their ageing Junker Ju-52 planes onto improvised airfields to bring in supplies and ferry out the injured. In the 19 days of the battle they would fly in almost 868 tons of ammunition and 82,949 gallons of fuel, while flying out 4,161 wounded soldiers. Doing so would cost dozens of aircraft and their crews, and gut Germany’s remaining air transport capability. The Belgian Walloon volunteer and prominent pre-war leader of the Cristus Rex Party, Léon Degrelle, wrote: ‘Every day our “Auntie” Ju’s [Junkers Ju-52] were shot down after a few minutes of flight, they would fall down in flames amid the screams of the wounded who were being grilled alive.’

  When the snow stopped a thaw would set in and turn the roads, already poor, into mud baths. Panzers would sink up to their side armour in the morass, to become stuck as if on flypaper. One of the Leibstandarte troopers in the relief columns said:

  The fighting began in
mud literally knee-deep. The heavy Ukrainian earth had mixed with snow to create a sticky mess. Even with a light nocturnal frost it hardened to hold vehicles tight and killed any chance of moving them again. Even tracked vehicles got hopelessly stuck in this lava-like mud.

  Bad as things were for von Manstein’s relief troops, conditions inside the Pocket were even worse as the battle neared the end of its second week. Degrelle:

  The tanks hadn’t come. The surrounded troops had held out as long as there was hope. Now everything was falling to pieces. We were down to our last cartridges. Since Sunday the quartermasters hadn’t any food. The wounded were dying by the hundreds from exposure and loss of blood. We were suffocating under the enemy pressure.

  One last effort

  Refusing to give in, von Manstein planned one last throw of the dice. Gathering all eight of his available panzer divisions; the 1st, 3rd, 11th, 13th, 14th, 16th, 17th and the 1st SS-Panzer Leibstandarte, he launched them northeast towards Lysyanka and its precious bridge over the Gniloy Tikich. At the same time, Stemmermann had moved his entire force southwest in a ‘wandering pocket’ formation to the village of Shanderovka, and there stubbornly held a perimeter waiting to break out. The village and its environs quickly became a hell-hole, crammed with desperate soldiers, more than two thousand wounded, hosts of Ukrainian camp-followers and all the detritus of an army in disintegration. SS-Unterscharführer Schorsch Neuber of the Wiking’s Signals Battalion (SS-Panzer Nachrichtung-Abteilung 5) recalled those last days: ‘We were tortured by hunger. For days we hadn’t anything to eat. Snow was our only sustenance. The last ration we received was laughingly small and was a small frozen-together lump of rice for eight men.’