With our troops in urgent need of fire support, I moved outside the bunker and contacted the teams manning our three 105-millimeter mortars, aware that the vertical trajectory of their fire made them more effective than our howitzers among the Duna’s tall trees. Uncertain how close the Russian assault had penetrated, my initial orders directed a barrage of mortar rounds into an area about 100 yards to our front.
When several salvos produced no diminishment in the intensity of the battle, I pulled the curtain of shells 50 yards nearer to us. The concentration of fire from our machine guns immediately made it clear, however, that the enemy had advanced even closer. Cutting the range back to coordinates 25 yards ahead of our frontline, I ordered a final bombardment, fearing that any further reduction might risk hitting our own troops.
As the mortar rounds slammed into a rectangular zone roughly 25 by 75 yards, the Soviet assault was finally halted. Rather than spreading out as they normally would in a daylight attack, the Red Army troops had clustered together in the darkness, amplifying the deadly results of our barrage. Our infantry later told me that just one of these rounds alone had killed ten to twenty Russians. The total enemy death toll from the 30 or so mortar shells must have been in the dozens.
One afternoon a few days later, I was resting in my bunker about 100 yards behind the front. Lieutenant Colonel (Oberstleutnant) Werner Ebeling, who had just become the acting regimental commander, entered and asked, “Lubbecke, do you have something to drink?” Pleased to have a chance to talk with him, I grabbed a bottle of cognac from under my bunk.
Almost immediately, three more officers I knew from the regimental staff appeared and demanded, “Is that all you have?” Happy to share my stock, I produced additional bottles.
The problem with this situation was the German custom of toasting. When a toast is made, everyone present must empty their glasses, turning them upside down as proof of their consumption. At the end of a long afternoon of toasts, we were all so drunk that we could barely walk.
Departing the bunker, we somehow stumbled the mile and a half backtothe Tross, no doubt resembling a bunch of drunken sailors. Locating our quartermaster, we obtained a barrel of salted herring and ate the fish right out of the top of it.
My impression is that we eventually wandered back up to the front, but I was too drunk to recall exactly. The following day, my head was aching with one of the worst hangovers I had ever experienced. For the rest of my life I have not been able to smell cognac without feeling ill.
BACK TOWARD RIGA: August 7–October 5, 1944
Shortly after our drinking party, advances by the Red Army threatened the German forces near Rokiskis with encirclement, forcing us to make our first major retreat in the Duna region on August 7. Withdrawing to the northwest over the course of the next couple of days, the 180 or so remaining men in my company established a new position near the western turn in the Nemunelis-Memele River. This placed us about 40 miles northwest of Rokiskis and roughly the same distance southeast of Riga.
When we reached our new position, I ordered a single round to be fired at a particular set of coordinates to our front, as was standard procedure. When our howitzer boomed behind me, I waited for the expected explosion in our front.
Instead, there was a blast right behind me and I realized that the shell had fallen short. Immediately afterward, an enlisted man came running up to our position yelling, “Those sons of bitches—they shot me!”
Uncertain whether the misfire resulted from a mistake on my part in calculating the range or an error by the gun crew, I did not volunteer that I might have been to blame for this incidence of “friendly fire.” Luckily, the man’s wound was slight and no one else was injured.
As August progressed, the situation on the Duna front grew more fluid and we were increasingly on the move. Red Army attacks across a wide front against outnumbered German troops led to the increasing use of ad hoc “fire brigades” assigned to block Russian penetrations. Their effective deployment was hampered by uncertainty as to whether the enemy was in front of us, to the side of us, or to our rear. To avoid being outflanked and encircled, there was ultimately no alternative but for the whole frontline to steadily pull back.
Acting as one of these emergency “fire brigades,” our heavy weapons company sometimes occupied an area of the front separate from our regimental infantry or even in support of units from another division. While none of the main Soviet assaults struck our company’s sector of the front, we frequently engaged in numerous smaller combat actions.
Whereas in offensive operations we used our guns to reduce the capability of the Soviet forces to resist an advance, in defensive actions we sought to break up concentrations of Red Army forces before they advanced or during an attack. When this failed, we sought to limit the enemy’s ability to closely follow our retreat.
When orders came to pull out of a position, our gun company was always the first part of the regiment to pull out since we required more time to load our equipment and also traveled more slowly. The regiment would leave a rearguard of the two or three infantry squads with machine guns supported by a couple of 75-millimeter howitzers or 105-millimeter mortars from our company. When this infantry rearguard pulled back, the remaining gun crews received little time to load their equipment and get on the road ahead of the pursuing Russians.
Throughout the Baltic region, there were a few large depots where the Wehrmacht had accumulated enormous quantities of supplies to support the operations of Army Group North. These stores of war materials and food often had to be hastily destroyed or simply abandoned because of the speed of the Red Army advance. Frequently, there were large clouds of black smoke billowing up into the sky behind the frontlines just before we retreated.
The loss of these depots caused certain types of supplies to grow tighter, but it also meant that we sometimes received delivery of large amounts of rare luxuries. In one instance, the army sent our division numerous bottles of Hennessey cognac that would otherwise have been lost. Under the constant threat of a Soviet attack, there were few opportune moments to allow the men to drink freely. Now more alert than ever to the dangers posed by excessive drinking, I kept the liquor supplies tightly rationed.
At a location further along in our retreat through the Duna region, there was a rare occasion when the divisional artillery coordinated with our heavy weapons company to jointly strike a target.
While our heavy weapons company supported the regimental infantry’s operations closer to the front, the artillery normally concentrated on targets in the enemy’s rear area. The forward observer for the regiment’s heavy gun company typically worked in close proximity and often exchanged ideas with his counterpart in the division’s main artillery regiment, but their distinct fire support missions meant that they almost always operated independently.
In this particular instance, our division’s intelligence had become suspicious that the Red Army was massing forces in a roughly ten-acre wooded area to our front. To destroy whatever was there, the artillery command requested our company to join them in a barrage on the Soviet position.
With my long experience as an F.O., it was possible for me to calculate almost down to the second how long it would take for the shells from our howitzers and mortars to reach a particular target. Coordinating with the artillery’s F.O., we sought to precisely time our barrages in order to deliver the maximum possible intensity of fire on the unsuspecting Soviet forces hidden in the forest.
Orchestrating the barrage from our guns by my watch, I first ordered the firing of our 105-millimeter mortars because it takes longer for their rounds to reach the target due to their high trajectory. This was closely followed by the firing of all of our 150-millimeter and 75-millimeter howitzers.
In about half a minute or so, hundreds of shells from our guns and the artillery simultaneously slammed into the woods. This devastating cataclysm of fire undoubtedly annihilated any Russian forces that might have been massing there. In such circumstances, it was impossible not to feel pity for the enemy.
A few lines from a series of letters to Anneliese during our steady retreat that August exposes my darkening mood at the Duna. With an almost fatalistic attitude about the future I wrote, “You and I will ful-fill our duties to the end.” With survival uncertain I penned, “Godwilling, we’ll see each other again.”
Yet, our love left me with hope that I expressed to her with the words, “I am grateful to have you, Dear Annelie.” When she sent me a lock of curls from her hair in a letter at the end of August, I placed them in my breast pocket as a talisman.
