War Girls Box Set

Chapter 7

November 1943, somewhere near Minsk, Russia

November 1943, somewhere near Minsk, RussiaRichard Klausen trudged through knee-deep snow, his feet freezing in the soaked leather boots. Nothing withstood the sub-zero temperatures in the White Russian taiga, certainly not the battered boots and inadequate uniform the Wehrmacht assigned her soldiers.

His trousers stopped mid-calf and had been patched more times than he could count. The steel helmet did nothing to keep the gusty winds from his head, and like most of his comrades he had wrapped an undershirt around his head for better protection.

“Dammit,” Richard cursed as he and Karl pushed against the handcart stuck in a snowdrift. Sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes. Moving that cart loaded with materiel was a b***h. They’d been fighting the Russians for two days and this morning Oberstleutnant Schottke had sent the two of them – together with a dozen walking wounded –to the camp for more ammo, more food, more medics, more field dressings, more of everything.

Richard just hoped they would reach the battlefield before their boys ran out of ammunition. It wasn’t like last year when he’d been a freshly drafted soldier. Everyone had been bursting with enthusiasm, bagging one victory after another against the Red Army. Supplies had been plentiful and replenishments came on time.

But now? The Wehrmacht was in retreat, one division after another collapsing under the attack of two different, but equally deadly enemies: the Red Army, outnumbering the Germans at least ten to one, and the brutal Russian winter.

With materiel stuck God knows where, a soldier counted himself lucky to own a pair of fitting leather boots without holes. The last functioning truck of their division awaited a delivery of fuel to be set in motion again.

“Push on three!” Karl said and together they shoved against the handcart. It gave a groan and a squeak, and finally crept through the snowdrift.

“Well done, mate,” Richard said and fell in pace beside his friend, hauling the handcart between them.

“If we keep up that speed, we’ll never reach our boys…” Karl rubbed his scruffy face with his free hand. Most of the men had given up on the luxury of shaving. Combat and vanity didn’t go hand in hand. Besides, a beard yielded some protection from the whipping cold.

“Don’t say that. We’re making good progress. I can already hear them,” Richard said.

As if to prove him right, the sound of MG42 fire cut through the air and in the ensuing moment of silence, they heard the barked instructions of their commanding officer, Oberstleutnant Schottke. Karl and Richard pushed the handcart harder, intent on bringing their comrades the much-needed relief. A distinctive howling sound cut through the air.

“Stalinorgel,” Richard shouted and dove for cover. The Katyusha rocket launcher was nicknamed Stalin’s organ, because the launch array resembled a church organ. But its bone-chilling wheezing sound was the worst nightmare of every German soldier. One of the deadliest Russian weapons, Stalin’s organ could fire several dozen rockets within a few seconds.

StalinorgelThe fury of the fighting continued unabated – shouting, smashing, screaming, only interrupted by a cacophony of gunfire or mortar fire, and several minutes later the next salvo of Katyusha rockets. To leave cover meant certain injury or death.

Time slowed to a crawl as Richard and Karl lay motionless in a ditch, the cold seeping into their bones, freezing through their clothes and trying to coax the life from their bodies.

Richard clenched his fists at his helplessness. The fumes from the munitions hung in a dense layer above the ground and forced their way down Richard’s nostrils and throat, leaving him gasping for breath until he was sure the toxin would suffocate him. A stray rocket hit the handcart; another one blew up a tree less than twenty feet away. The wind lashed and howled mournfully as the fiery assault charred and blackened the earth.

When twilight settled over the taiga, the fighting finally stopped. Richard crawled out of the ditch to witness an overwhelming sight: his battalion had been obliterated, perishing in the c*****e. The few surviving comrades were being frogmarched away with their hands behind their heads.

“Everyone gone,” Richard said in a faltering voice as he crawled back into the ditch.

Karl only opened his eyes wide and nodded. Silence ensued as both of them contemplated the implications of their thoughts. The relief to be alive mixed with guilt and self-doubt. If we had pushed harder, arrived earlier… Logic told Richard that a few more weapons and ammunition wouldn’t have made a difference, would have only prolonged the fight against a superior enemy, but his heart wanted to argue.

If we had pushed harder, arrived earlier… After a while Karl cleared his throat, saying, “Knochensammlung.” Bone collection, as they called the task of searching for wounded comrades.

Knochensammlung“Indeed,” Richard answered and labored to get up from the frozen ground. They walked the battlefield back and forth, but Ivan had done a good job and left only lifeless bodies scattered about the place. Snow began to fall like a blanket of shame covering the devastation.

An agonizing cry of pain ripped through the still iciness of the cold winter air. Richard and Karl bolted in the direction of the sound, finding a fellow prone on the icy tundra, nothing more than a mess of blood with limbs missing.

Richard had been in combat long enough to know that the specter of death knocked at the man’s door. He couldn’t do anything other than caress the man’s cheek and wait. He sat down beside the fellow and started talking, telling stories about better times, plentiful food, warm clothes, and beautiful girls. The wounded man’s breath rattled and…stopped. Richard stood up, shaking a fist into the sky.

Dark gray clouds jumbled together in one great, frenzied muddle, with no other imaginable purpose but to block out any light and warmth from the pale sun low on the horizon.

“Nothing left for us to do here. Let’s go,” Richard said and grabbed Karl’s hand, needing the comfort of another human soul.

Without a word, they trudged back to the camp to report the annihilation of their battalion. But when they reached the campsite, nothing remained but an empty shell. The battalion’s camp had been razed to the ground.

Richard fell to the icy ground, sobs shaking his thin body. He’d been conscripted into this god-awful war the day he’d turned seventeen. His mother’s face came to his mind. She’d tried to hide her tears when saying good-bye to her only son, sending him to serve in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

His three sisters Ursula, Anna, and Lotte had put on a brave face, but they couldn’t fool him. Lotte, only one year younger than him, had punched him and threatened, “You’d better stay alive, or I’ll personally make sure you’ll regret dying for the rest of your afterlife.”

The image of his fiery, outspoken sister made him smile. Getting on her bad side wasn’t something anyone wanted to experience, so he’d better make sure he survived this mess.

“We need to leave,” Richard said.

“But where to?” Karl sat on the ground with sagging shoulders, his head moving back and forth.

“I don’t know. Westward. We need to find another division and join up with them.” Richard said, his uniform flecked with the debris of battle.

“Hmmm…” Karl glanced over to Richard. “Hmmm…” The time immediately after a battle was always the worst. The sense of loss and depression could throw a soldier for a loop. Richard couldn’t let his friend wallow in his foul mood.

“Get up, numbskull, we have work to do!”

Karl’s eyes glinted at the insult and he raised a fist. “Do we? And since when are you the boss here, asshole?”

“Since you’re drowning in self-pity. Get your arse up and help me look for food,” Richard yelled at his friend, who showed a shadow of a grin before getting up.

“Food. Now we’re talking.”

Together they scoured what used to be the camp, and found plenty of food scattered about where the field kitchen had been.

They wolfed down bread, dried meat, and boiled potatoes in amounts they hadn’t eaten in months, and filled their satchels with all the food they could carry. Then they scrounged around for anything else they could use: weapons, reserve magazines, and warm clothing.

“We have to do what we must,” Karl said and pulled off a heavy overcoat and woolen socks from one of the corpses. Richard mirrored his actions, shutting out all thoughts of piety. The fallen comrades had no more use for earthly warmth. But he and Karl would not survive the night in the ragtag clothing draped from their bodies.

Clad each in three pairs of socks and two thick overcoats, Karl and Richard huddled in a ditch, praying to survive the night. They would start their trek into the unknown with the rising sun.

Richard had never wanted to be a soldier. Back at home in Berlin, he’d spent his leisure time with his nose buried in a book. Any book. Much to the dismay of his sister Lotte, who always challenged him to commit one or the other sort of mischief with her. Not entirely unselfishly, he remembered, because in case they were caught, Richard, the boy and the older child, would usually receive the punishment.

In the Hitler Youth, Richard had been content with his place at the end of the line: the small, shy, and gentle boy, unable – or rather unwilling – to keep up with the rest. And if this war hadn’t happened, he would have finished school and gotten a degree in teaching in secondary schools. Literature. German language. Instilling his love for the written word in others.

But fate handed him a Wehrmacht uniform and frostbitten toes.

Nothing more than an inept schoolboy, and they’d thrown him into combat. The three weeks’ training hadn’t really made a difference. Just enough to handle an MP40, the standard infantry weapon, and an MG42 with confidence.

He and Karl had been the youngest in their battalion when they arrived. Seventeen-year-old boys, as opposed to the battle-hardened older and more experienced men.

All gone now.

Eighteen months in brutal combat on the Eastern Front had apparently transformed him into a man.

A survivor.

Since they didn’t have orders and were cut off from their chain of command, they decided to walk until they found a railway track and follow it westward in the hope of encountering another German unit. They sure as hell didn’t want to fall into Russian hands.

After many days of mindless walking at day, and huddling in ditches at night, they found a track. Richard and Karl walked several more hours before they heard a hissing and huffing freight train approach. Unsure whether it was a German or a Russian train, they sought cover behind a hedge.

“It’s showing the swastika,” Karl yelled over the noise and jumped up waving his hands. But the long train didn’t slow down.

“Run!” Richard shouted and took off toward the moving train, until he managed to get ahold of the handle bar of one of the last wagons. Karl jumped right up with him and they caught their breath on the tiny platform between two wagons.

“Now what?” Karl asked.

“We need to get inside or we’ll soon drop off with frostbitten hands.”

After some work they managed to squeeze open the door in a haphazard manner and finally fell on the wooden floor boards of the dirty old train that had no doubt unloaded its supplies somewhere at the front and now returned for more. They both passed out from sheer exhaustion, the monotonous rumble lulling them into sleep.

When they awoke, the day had dawned and threw its meager light on an unknown yet familiar world.

“Any idea where we are?” Richard asked, as they passed once picturesque towns and villages that were now a pitiful picture of devastation.

“Nah…but at least it’s warmer,” Karl answered, peeling off one of his greatcoats. A heavy sleet fell, dousing everything with gloomy-looking grime.

“We’ve been driving for how long? Ten hours? Twelve hours?” Their watches had many months ago stopped functioning. If it was the brutal cold in the White Russian taiga, the artillery smoke, or the constant mistreatment, Richard didn’t know. Nor did he care.

“Twelve hours westward, which should bring us to somewhere in Poland,” Karl said and pointed at the rising sun haloing the sky in their wake. The rays of weak winter sun cast the rubble strewn along the railway into a dim light. Roads and bridges had ceased to exist. Devastation loomed over every horizon. But life went on. Children played about the ruins, not minding the cold and damp.

Richard took the last piece of dried meat from his pack and gulped it down with melted snow from his water bottle. The engine chugged along dragging its load seemingly forever, winding its way around hills and groaning down steep passes. It clanked and wheezed with overwork and lack of steady maintenance, keeping the voracious war machine moving.

“One day this will end, and things will be put right again,” Karl said almost to himself. When he got no response from his friend, he asked, “Don’t you think so, Richard? This will be over soon?”

“Over for whom?” Richard replied, shrugging his shoulders still warmly encased in the huge gray overcoat. For the first time in weeks he wasn’t freezing, but he couldn’t summon anything else to feel optimistic about. It was better not to delve into an uncertain future. Instead, he took out a notebook and a pencil he always kept in his breast pocket and wrote a letter home.

It was his way to cope with loneliness and desolation. Writing letters eased his mind off the grimy reality, and let him escape into a better world, at least for a while. None of these letters ever got sent home, because he didn’t believe them adequate to express his genuine thoughts. Still, he felt the connection with those he loved while writing and rereading them.

Beloved Mutter, my dearest sisters, he wrote, and the unsteady movement of the train gave his words a childish scrawl.

Beloved Mutter, my dearest sisters, You will be happy to know that I am well and am traveling with my friend Karl to our next mission. The winter is uncommonly cold for this time of the year with Siberian temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius below zero, strong winds, and four to five feet or more of snow.

You will be happy to know that I am well and am traveling with my friend Karl to our next mission. The winter is uncommonly cold for this time of the year with Siberian temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius below zero, strong winds, and four to five feet or more of snow.Lots of snow. He remembered the blood on the snow.

Lots of blood. Though he failed to recall many of the details of that fateful day, the sight of blood and the foul stench of c*****e remained burned into his brain.

Don’t worry, dearest Mutter, I received a new greatcoat and woolen socks to keep me warm. The food is nothing compared to your wonderful cooking, but at least we don’t go hungry.

Don’t worry, dearest Mutter, I received a new greatcoat and woolen socks to keep me warm. The food is nothing compared to your wonderful cooking, but at least we don’t go hungry.Writing the letter didn’t help to easy his mind today. His stomach clenched at the reminder of ravaging the supplies meant for an entire battalion.

Love always,

Love always,Your son Richard.

Your son Richard.He closed the notebook with a deep sigh.

Karl glanced up saying, “I don’t understand why you write all those letters and never post them.”

“I don’t understand it myself. I…I want to feel close to my family, but I don’t want to drag them into this insane war…”