anti-tank guns and infantry had wiped out much of the attacking force. However, several of the massive vehicles successfully penetrated our defenses and advanced into Uritsk along the Uferstrasse (Shoreline Street) that ran between a cliff and the water’s edge on the Gulf of Finland.
Operating as the F.O. in one of the frontline bunkers of our still incomplete defenses, I heard the sound of heavy fighting about a quarter of a mile away. With my habitual curiosity, I sought a position on the cliff from where I could witness the battle play out 50 yards below. Just after reaching my observation point, a battery comprised of two German 88-millimeter Flak guns deployed on the high ground beside me. These 88s could be directed skyward against enemy aircraft or fired level at ground targets, operating like giant rifles.
Seven KV-1s and KV-2s soon lumbered into view with troops on foot following close behind them. These larger tanks were joined by a couple of smaller Czech T-35s. Having reached a point two miles from their frontlines, the greatly diminished Soviet armored formation would advance no further.
As I watched with fascination, the crews manning the 88s quickly scored a hit on the lead tank. Unable to maneuver or to elevate their barrels high enough to hit targets on top of the cliff, the remaining Russian armor was in a helpless and hopeless position. Over the next 20 minutes, the deadly 88s proceeded to pick off one after another of the KV’s and T-35’s trapped on the street below.
Under continual machine-gun fire, the surviving tank crews and infantry attempted to escape back the way they had come, but found their route blocked. In an area just beyond my field of vision, our Pioniers had moved in behind them to detonate large explosives that destroyed the road, preventing their retreat.
In desperation, many of the enemy troops jumped into the water, but few succeeded in making it back to their lines. By the following day, the remaining Soviet forces in the Uritsk and Petergof areas were eliminated. This ill-conceived fiasco had cost the Red Army 35 tanks, 1,369 dead, and 294 prisoners.
Over time, the Russians would increasingly employ large tank formations in their operations. To meet this threat, a German division had a number of options. In the first instance, each regiment possessed an anti-tank company equipped with high velocity artillery pieces. While these companies were usually able to cope with enemy armor, the divisional artillery might also be used in extreme cases.
As the action on the Uferstrasse demonstrated, it was, however, the 88-millimeter anti-aircraft artillery that proved to be the most effective German anti-tank weapon of the war, even though it was typically used only in crisis situations when enemy armor came in mass or had achieved a breakthrough in our lines.
During a quiet interval soon after the tank attack, Staff Sergeant Ehlert led a small group of us from the communications platoon on an excursion to the recently captured tsarist-era palace at Petergof, near where the Red Army had just attempted their amphibious landing. At that time, the palace and the grounds around it still appeared untouched by fighting.
Inside, we strolled down the paneled wood floors through its long elegant halls, now mostly emptied of furnishings. Coming across a piano in one of the rooms, Ehlert pulled up the bench and began to play. Unaware of his talent, we were amazed as beautiful classical music began to echo around us in the chamber. As the afternoon sun streamed into the room through the large windows, it was almost possible for me to imagine the tsar playing the same piano surrounded by his family and court.
At the end of his virtuoso performance, Ehlert opened the piano and found several pages of sheet music deposited inside. After displaying his discovery, he folded a couple of sheets into the pocket of his tunic as a souvenir. Back on the frontlines a short time later, such opulence seemed much farther away than the few miles that separated us.
Having been promoted to the rank of lance corporal (Obergefreiter) on October 1, I was now permanently tasked to serve as our company’s forward observer, which meant increased interaction with the company commander. At the beginning of November, First Lt. Von Kempski, who had earned our respect leading us since Belgium, was promoted to the divisional staff. He was replaced by Second Lt. Munstermann, who had fortunately suffered no lasting ill effects from the artillery barrage at the Plyussa.
By mid-October, a frost had already hardened the landscape and it began to snow. At about this same time, we were able to shift out of temporary shelters into our more permanent rear bunkers constructed jointly by the regular troops and our Pioniers. Whereas the bunkers along the front provided us with additional protection and acted as defensive strongpoints, our rear bunkers would serve as our living quarters in Uritsk.
In building our rear bunkers the Pioniers followed a standard method of construction. After digging out waist-deep holes between 10 to 50 square feet in size, they erected log walls and heaped part of the just excavated soil against them. Following the placement of heavy timber beams or tree trunks to serve as a roof, they then covered the top of the bunker with the remaining soil. Despite offering little protection in the event of a direct hit by the Red Army’s heavy artillery, the bunkers offered us a measure of warmth from the freezing temperatures outside.
At Uritsk, my assignment as the F.O. required me to spend perhaps three-quarters of my time in one of the various bunkers located along the front or even out ahead of our infantry’s frontline. In contrast with the rear bunkers, the frontline bunker was little more than a covered ditch with a slot for observation. As the snow grew deeper, we piled it into a wall that ran in front of our line of forward bunkers and trenches in order to conceal our movements from enemy observation.
If it was quiet at the front, I normally made the short trip back to my rear bunker a couple of times a day. Furnished with only a dirt floor and walls, bunks, a table, and a wood-burning stove, the rear bunkers were primitive but made a comfortable dwelling for four to six men. Because the 13th Company’s howitzers were located only a quarter of a mile further back, my friends Schutte and Sauke, who were both now serving in gun crews, were able to reside with me and another comrade in the same bunker. Asserting our veteran status in the company, we posted a sign reading “The Four Old Sacks” over its entrance. Naturally, we tended to spend most of our free time with the half dozen or so other comrades we had known from the Luneburg barracks.
Especially when there was little fighting, our bunker was a refuge for us to relax, sleep, eat hot meals, play cards, read mail, and write letters. Such a sanctuary gave us an essential escape from the stress of combat and the exhausting vigilance required at the frontline.
In November 1941, just after we had settled into our new bunkers, we began to confront bitterly freezing temperatures of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. This was far colder than any conditions we had ever experienced in Germany.
In the harsh months that followed, the wounded on both sides sometimes froze to death where they fell before they could be transported back behind the lines for medical care. By my estimation, the cold weather that first winter in Russia was responsible for perhaps a third of the deaths among casualties who might otherwise have survived. Of course, this type of death was even more common in mobile warfare such as that taking place on Army Group Center’s front as it engaged in the Battle of Moscow far to the south of us.
The temperature dropped so low that it actually caused the grease in our weapons to freeze unless we fired them regularly or took measures to protect them from the cold. Other soldiers told me that they witnessed entire steam engines that had been frozen solid down to the grease in their wheels. The weather-related problems in the transportation network intermittently resulted in supply problems that occasionally forced the army to reduce our rations to half a loaf of bread per day. Though only providing enough for us to survive, we knew it was far more than the amount supplied to the cut-off Russian population in Leningrad.
Transportation problems and inadequate planning also led to a four- to six-week delay in the provision of warmer clothing to replace our summer uniforms. As a F.O. operating on the frontline, I needed winter camouflage and was therefore lucky to be one of the first to receive an army-issued white helmet, a white poncho, white coat, and white pants as the most extreme cold arrived.
As the snow grew to a foot in depth, it became much easier to travel by ski than on foot when I crossed the couple of hundred yards between the forward and rear bunkers. More importantly, skis allowed me to move much more swiftly across the open area that was exposed to the fire of Russian snipers.
These sharpshooters had been posted in large numbers among the multi-story buildings at the edge of Leningrad’s suburbs, approximately a mile away from our front line at Uritsk. This situation reflected the Red Army’s effort throughout the war to field larger numbers of better-equipped, well-trained snipers than the Wehrmacht. Our snipers considered the Soviet scoped rifles superior and preferred to use captured Russian weapons rather than the equivalent German rifle. When I once had the opportunity to test one, its precision amazed me.
The accuracy of sniper fire meant that the number of killed relative to wounded was much higher than with other weapons. Our helmets protected us pretty well from glancing bullets or shrapnel, but if a bullet hit one
