that seemed designed to acquire our food supplies as much as to occupy our positions. When the Soviet troops broke into our trenches, we would often fall back a couple of hundred yards while they went into our bunkers to pilfer our food stocks. With time to regroup, we would organize a counterattack that threw them back out of our positions, almost as if we were operating on a tacitly agreed schedule.
Of course, some days stand out. On Sunday June 17, I turned 23. Normally, birthdays at the front received little recognition. On this occasion, Second Lt. Reichardt, the company commander, took note of mine and presented me with a bottle of cognac. He also used the rare calm at the front to hold our first church service since the start of the war in Russia almost two years earlier. Such respites from the conflict never lasted long.
Sometimes the war would strike unexpectedly. As I was walking among some large trees behind our lines on a quiet day, I heard the distant boom of an enemy artillery piece. Keeping my ears tuned to the whistle of the incoming round, I suddenly realized that it was coming close, very close. Instantly flinging myself flat, I pressed my body down into the rain-soaked earth. In that brief moment while I awaited its impact, life or death seemed equally possible.
My ears had not deceived me. The shell landed only three or four feet away from my prone body, but fortunately plunged deep into the mud before detonating. Incredibly, the explosion left me covered with mire, but otherwise unhurt.
Even when we slept, combat often filled our dreams. One night, I came partially awake in our bunker, mistakenly believing in my still semi-conscious state that we were under enemy attack. Snatching a hand grenade, I yelled, “The Russians are coming!”
Fortunately for me, my communications specialist was fully alert and managed to yank the grenade from my hand before the pin was removed. Because we were down in a bunker, there was no way I could have gotten rid of it in time. In that confined space the blast would have killed us both. Even though my assistant was my subordinate, rank mattered little in such a situation. At that moment, he was simply a comrade who was looking out for me, just as I would look out for him.
As the weeks at the front passed, my time at home came to seem like a far-off dream, though Anneliese remained constantly in my thoughts. For her twenty-second birthday on June 29, I arranged to have a dozen red roses sent to her. It was as much an expression of my hope for our future together as it was a token of my deep affection.
While my correspondence to her was mostly devoted to expressing my feelings, I would sometimes make passing mention of our combat operations in terms that would pass the censor’s scrutiny. In a letter to Anneliese on June 20, I referenced a dual between our howitzers and Soviet artillery. Writing on July 10, I noted that our howitzers and mortars had successfully repulsed an assault by the Russians against our position. Such engagements were routine for us and otherwise soon forgotten.
AT THE NEVA: July 24–September 4, 1943
On July 22, the Red Army initiated the Third Battle of Ladoga, renewing its struggle to break the German siege lines east of Leningrad in the area close to the lake. Two days later, our division was rushed the 15 miles from the Krasny Bor sector to a key position beside the Neva River in an area known as the Sinyavino Heights. This placed us about four miles southeast of Lake Ladoga and three miles northwest of the critical rail junction of Mga.
The 58th Division soon experienced some of its heaviest fighting of the war as the Soviet 67th Army attempted to seize the high ground from us. The struggle on August 4 was particularly brutal. The 154th Regiment’s attempt to regain the ground it had lost had to be broken off after the counterattack met with stiff enemy resistance and heavy losses. On August 8, we experienced more tough fighting that tied me down in a foxhole for hours.
On a generally quiet day a short time later, a strange episode occurred as I was tramping along a dirt road on the way from my frontline position to my rear bunker about a mile behind the front. As I approached the area just behind our howitzers, a young German second lieutenant wearing an unsoiled uniform came strolling up the road toward me from the north. This immediately struck me as odd since the German Army had no units located in that direction.
While I was baffled by his presence in the area, the officer did not appear nervous or exhibit any suspicious behavior. As we passed one another, he cordially returned my salute and I dismissed my apprehensions.
Two hours later, Soviet heavy artillery slammed 50 or 60 shells into our position with pinpoint accuracy. Only our deeply dug set of entrenchments prevented the bombardment from causing any casualties or damage to the howitzers.
Instantly, my mind flashed back to the mysterious German officer. In retrospect, I concluded that he must indeed have been a Russian agent gathering intelligence. His close-up scouting of our position would explain the enemy’s ability to target our camouflaged position so precisely. Convinced of my failure to identify a spy, I silently vowed to be far more wary of anything unusual in the future.
On an afternoon a few days later, I headed up to the frontline to join my close comrade Sergeant Schutte, who had begun interchanging with me as our company’s F.O. Becoming suspicious about the unusual quiet that followed the recent artillery attack, he warned me that the Red Army might be preparing another assault.
Deciding to study the enemy position myself, I climbed up the branches of a pine tree at the edge of the forest about 100 yards behind our trenches. In case any targets appeared, I hauled along a field telephone. Perhaps half an hour after I reached my perch about 20 feet up, four Soviet T-34 tanks suddenly appeared from the north- east and began a slow advance across the flat ground directly toward my location in the tree. Soldiers were riding on top of the tanks, which were followed by a large number of additional infantry on foot. While our company’s heavy guns were not designed to serve in an anti-tank role and lacked armor-piercing rounds, I knew from long experience that it was possible to accurately target the fire of the guns into an area about ten square yards in size.
With a chance to halt the advance before it progressed any further toward our regiment’s position, I used the field telephone to direct one of our 150-millimeter guns to fire a round against the closest T-34, about 500 yards to my front. Falling just to the left of the target, the first shell’s blast knocked the enemy troops from the tank but failed to damage the vehicle. After redirecting the howitzer to shift its fire to the right, the next round fell short of the tank. The third shell landed very close, missing the T-34 by only a few feet.
Receiving a further correction, the gun crew fired a fourth round. When the shell detonated against the turret, the tank instantly ground to a halt. Seconds later, a small plume of white smoke began to drift from the vehicle.
Shifting my attention to a second T-34 about 20 yards behind the destroyed one, I called in a fifth round. Smashing into its treads from the side, the shell’s explosion immobilized the vehicle, forcing its crew to jump out and run for cover. The third Soviet tank in the group immediately ceased its advance while the fourth one began to retreat.
As this assault ended, a larger group of around fifteen tanks momentarily came into view 1,000 yards behind the scene of the attack before moving out of sight behind a hill. Unsure whether this larger armored force would renew the advance, I telephoned back to headquarters to make our new regimental commander, Colonel (Oberst) Hermann-Heinrich Behrend, aware of the situation.
“Where are you?” he demanded before I could even speak.
“I am in a tree right behind the front line,” I responded with some trepidation.
“What the hell are you doing up there?” he yelled back, obviously concerned that I would place myself in such a vulnerable position.
Informing him that we had stopped an armored attack probing our defenses, I warned that significant tank forces were massing behind it and might conduct another assault.
After requesting details on the number of tanks and their location, he indicated that he would pass along the intelligence to divisional headquarters and then hung up. Once their initial thrust had been halted, the Soviets did not, however, attempt to renew their attack on our sector of the front.
Despite my thrill at knocking out the tanks, there was still a danger that the enemy would spot me the
