Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  “Celebrating my induction into Major's tank battalion, many of my new comrades got sloshed. Because of my weak condition I had a low tolerance for their 120-proof vodka. I'd pretend to drink but keep it in my mouth, then go out as if I had to pee and spit it out. I did that so many times they must have thought I had a very small bladder.

  “During my induction artillery was prepping the Hitlerites, but what the hell, World War II could wait, said the translator. The longer we waited the longer we'd live! That called for another round. The vodka was so strong it made my nose run. Major ordered attention and announced that if Yo was now a fellow soldier, what kind should he be? She really knew which buttons to push. The tank drivers said I should be a driver—of course, because the tanks were made in Michigan! The gunners shouted no, an American should shoot American shells! The recon sergeants shouted louder that I should be a scout because I'd already been behind Hitlerite lines. A scout is what I wanted to be, what I thought I'd do best. I knew something about the terrain to the west and what the Hitlerites had there—not much, from what I'd seen.

  “What I started off as was an infantryman on Major's tank. That was okay. I'd be a few feet from the CO, and a battalion commander usually doesn't get killed—unless he's Bob Wolverton. Now I wanted a weapon and asked for a tommy gun like the one I'd jumped into Normandy with. There were plenty of Lend-Lease tommy guns in Major's battalion, but no one wanted to give his up. So I was armed with a PPSh-41, the Russian submachine gun they'd used on the farm couple. It held seventy slugs in a drum. With some grenades to stuff in my overcoat pockets, I was ready to get back into the war.”

  Joe asked for a steel helmet but was told nyet, we are a tank battalion and wear pile caps, not helmets. They gave him one, a furry wool cap with ear flaps and rayon padding. His new buddies weren't quite sober when he was taken out to test-fire the PPSh-41. It was one of the simplest automatic weapons in the world “Gl-proof “ it would have been called in the U.S. Army—with nothing that could be screwed up—only the trigger to pull (no safety), two parts to separate for cleaning, and they could be put back together only one way. Bullets went in the drum and came out the barrel. That was all there was to the PPSh-41, but the men who pulled its trigger had sent the Wehrmacht retreating a thousand miles—at the loss of a thousand Russian soldiers' lives per mile.*

  For Joe's second basic training he shot up some trees, reloaded and then climbed on deck as Major hopped inside her tank and the Sherman revved up and headed off into the woods through which he'd escaped. Major shouted a battle cry. The infantry answered with the strangest and hugest sound Joe has ever heard from human voices, something like a lion with indigestion. Ohh-AH!—about two seconds for the Oh, a half second for the AH. The cry gave him a jolt, a shiver, and the conviction that he sure wouldn't want to be a Hitlerite in a foxhole hearing that coming toward him, for it seemed to be the voice of a wrathful God warning how the war would end.

  Whenever the battalion attacked Major bellowed out her battle cry, answered by the troops with Ohh-AH. Joe very much wanted to understand what inspirational words set and sent them off. After a successful assault he asked the commissar, who chuckled and said “Follow my ass as if you can have it!”

  ALL JOE REMEMBERS of her battalion's designation is that it was in the 6th Guards Tank Army, part of the First Beloruss-ian Front. Major commanded about five hundred of the seven million soldiers who had been struggling their way west for two years since the war turned around at Stalingrad, now a thousand miles to the rear. Casualties had been so horrific that there were few veterans with more than four months' service in her unit. Manpower was so scarce that half the troops were teenage and the tank crews women. This made a virtue of necessity, as Joe saw it, because he found women to be more mechanically adept than Russian men, who treated a tank like a horse—put in fuel, then ride it till it dies.

  The First Belorussian Front, under overall command of Marshal Georgi Zhukov, had been refitting and regrouping east of Warsaw during the fall of 1944 while other Russian armies spilled into the Balkans. Zhukov's well-prepared attack from the Vistula to the Oder kicked off about two weeks before Joe's second escape from III-C. Major's battalion was on the straightest line and in the forefront of Stalin's drive for Berlin and to annihilate the Third Reich.

  Opposing him were two million Wehrmacht frontline troops. In the west another million were doggedly holding out in Italy and along the Rhine. On all fronts the Germans were being bludgeoned down to their death throes yet still viciously capable of fulfilling Hitler's last wish, which was to kill and kill till the last German who could kill was killed himself.

  Joe's comrades well understood what the rules were in this last inning of the war. He himself began to understand when watching the German couple become hog fodder. That didn't bother him at the time because he was looking forward to a reunion with the Gestapo in Berlin. Though only two words, “Berlin” and “Hitlerite,” were enough of a common language to bond him with his new battalion (“I used to be a Blue; now I was a Red!”).

  It took him a week to get an idea of how they operated. That skirmish he'd witnessed out in the farm fields involved Russian reconnaissance troops and vehicles. They'd been sent ahead to probe the Wehrmacht positions and, without support except for artillery, had been able to push back the Hitlerites. The recon troops were the best he saw. They didn't belong to Major but came from her regiment. They were mostly Slavs from western Russia and the Ukraine and looked like pictures of Russians Joe had seen.

  Her tankers were also Slavs, but her infantry were Siberians, actually Mongols. They weren't the finest, but they were surely the hardiest soldiers Joe ever saw in any army. The Mongols were cannon fodder; they knew it and didn't seem to mind. The tankers had tanks to keep them warm and carry rations and shelter. The Mongols had what they carried on their backs and only themselves huddled together for warmth. The rations they received were usually frozen. They'd scrounge wood and make little fires.

  “Most of them didn't even speak Russian, so we had something in common. There was nothing called the Third World then, but that's what they were, from a third world used by a dictator from a second world, which was a world apart from the first world I was brought up in. I couldn't imagine how these third-worlders could be so tough and never complain.”

  The Slavs had long since understood the Mongols' place and shrugged when Joe mentioned it. There was not much sympathy in the Red Army, least of all for the cannon fodder.

  “Operations went like this,” Joe explains. “Recon elements went out and found Hitlerite positions. If they could penetrate, they did, as they had near the farmhouse. If not, Major sent up her Mongol infantry. They could move fast over the ground, a lot faster than I could. They closed in like Indians, using every bit of cover and concealment. They're little guys, most of them five-footers, so they could really hide and scoot.

  “The Mongols had no radios, so they couldn't tell Major what was going on. She had to sense it from the amount of incoming and outgoing fire. Major hung back and moved her tank around till she got an idea of what the Mongols had run up against. Then she decided where to attack. She always at-tacked; there was never a question of whether, only where. That's what her men expected, and that's when they started slugging vodka.”

  On only one occasion while Joe was with Major did her initial attack fail. She had two radios—out of a total of five in the whole battalion. In Third Battalion 506th, there were about sixty radios of various types. Americans need to talk to one another a lot during battle in order to adjust plans, tactics, and support. The Russians had only one of each. They could only change what they were doing very slowly. It was the difference between a speedboat and an ocean liner. They steamed ahead till they overran objectives or their plans proved drastically wrong.

  One time Major's attack stalled. Her first radio was to communicate with her three company commanders, who described the situation. Joe had picked up a bit of Russian by then, and it sounded like a
telephone conversation, as if the Hitlerites couldn't overhear. But they did overhear, and often it cost the Russians dearly.

  With her second radio Major called for artillery and Katyusha rockets, the famous “Stalin organs” that screamed like banshees and terrorized the Hitlerites. She had to really make a pitch on the radio for this support; other units were in hot fights and needed it too. She called the artilleryman by his first name, not a call sign. She persuaded him, so before long a dozen 1934-model Ford trucks drove up and parked behind her tank.

  “On each chassis was a rack of six-foot rockets with forty-pound warheads,” Joe recalls. “When they salvoed it sounded like jets taking off next to my ear. Major's crew knew this was my first experience with Katyushas and had a good laugh as I held my head.

  “We got into action almost every day but usually not much. I saw no Hitlerites to shoot at, not with my short-range submachine gun, and Major's tank fired only a few times. What the Hitlerites were doing was setting us up for their artillery. They must have had spotters concealed in the woods. Suddenly we'd get a shower of shells. The tanks would stop and we'd get under them, then the tanks scattered when the shelling stopped. It never went on for very long; the Wehr-macht must have been short of ammo. But this harassing fire was effective in making us stop and restart. We'd usually cover only a few miles a day.

  “About an hour before dark we'd coil up for the night. At that time it was crouch-over cold—subzero with wind, a small wind, but it went through your clothes as if they weren't there. The tank engines had to be kept running or else they'd freeze up. So the most important supply from the rear was gas and arctic lubes, followed by vodka and rations. Mechanics would work a little on the tanks, then everyone bedded down in any shelter they could find. I'd heard the Russians had a great reputation as night fighters, but you couldn't prove it by this outfit. They had combat habits that generally worked, so they stuck with them, even though to me it was like a mob fighting an army.

  “They were pushing the Wehrmacht back, and that's all that mattered. Because I was sometimes close to the radio I could tell that Major's commander didn't call often and never chewed her out for advancing too slowly. One time the battalion on our left got ahead of us by a couple of miles and asked for her to protect their flank. She said relax, we'd gone far enough for the day.

  “Once a day Major let me look at her map, which showed the front lines. It was printed in the Russian alphabet, so the names meant nothing to me, but I sure was impressed by the map's scale. It showed half of Poland! It was as if the 506th, in a small part of Normandy, had used just the map of France! With maps like that, how Russian artillery ever hit a specific target is still a mystery to me. I think the artillery commander had to go up and look at it, estimate the distance from his guns, go back and adjust fire by trial and error. It was even worse for the Katyushas, which could barely hit a given acre on the first volley. The krauts understood this weakness. They'd keep us under fire and wouldn't withdraw till either the Mongols closed in or the artillery finally found its target.

  “Our tanks fired line of sight over the Mongols. The trans-lator noticed how interested I was in the Mongols and told me a joke: Did I know why the Siberians were picked to assault in front of tanks? Because the Russians were so tall they'd be hit in the head by the tanks' fire.

  “I was always glad when the translator was around,” Joe remembers. “My Russian was so little, and there were many things I wanted to learn from the troops and they wanted to learn from me. They were very generous with everything I could use but not with each other. Sometimes the translator was pulled back to regiment to interrogate Hitlerites that had been captured. Then the only person who could understand me was the commissar. I wasn't a favorite with him the way I was with the troops.

  “Obviously he had to keep an eye on me. Though I was an ally I was also a capitalist. When I'd ask him questions, even simple questions, he always answered in a roundabout way as if considering what ulterior motive might be behind my question. Then I'd get a long spiel about how the people this or the people that, and the Siberians were perfectly equal to everyone else and were proud to do their bit for the good of the proletariat, the Motherland, et cetera. Something I've never figured out: the krauts always referred to their country as the Fatherland, the Russians as their Motherland. After a while I just gave up with the commissar. He sounded a lot like Goebbels.

  “But the tankers kept coming around asking him to ask me questions. He didn't like too much of that, and it took a long time before I got the gist of the questions, which were things like how much did I make in my civilian job, did my father own a horse or have use of a tractor, how many families lived in my house, had I ever been to school, how much did coal cost? Almost every question connected some way with standards of living.”

  The commissar's main job was to keep the troops pumped up to fight the war. His constant theme was how foul and cruel the Hitlerites were, how they'd scorched the earth of Russia and depopulated it. Joe was probably his most interested listener because the troops did not need to hear about the Hitlerites—they knew them firsthand, not only on the battlefield but at home—yet sometimes tears would trickle down and freeze in their mustaches as they listened.

  Twenty-five years later John Beyrle was studying at Leningrad University with help from a Muskegon County grant. When Joe visited him and met some Russians he found that the attitude toward Hitlerites had hardly changed at all. They'd killed about one out of every ten Russians alive at the start of World War II and caused terrible loss and suffering for the rest. In America many people have trouble remembering World War II. In Russia they can't and never will forget it.

  “Day by day we were fighting the war together and winning it,” Joe says. “Just the same I began to feel that they were treating me in a way that meant I was not really one of them. Something beyond our difficulty in communicating and difference in nationality.

  “When we'd hit some resistance I'd head off toward it, but there'd always be some Russians who'd get ahead of me, get between me and incoming fire. It got so I couldn't get in a fight if I wanted to—and I did! They were protecting me. I didn't like it, but I couldn't let on. I didn't want to be the battalion mascot or the CO's pet. The way I worked out of that status was by helping tune and repair radios, my subspecialty at Fort Benning. Things happen for a reason in life. What I'd learned in Panama produced results in Poland, of all places.”

  Joe gained much respect for that but not as much as for his secondary specialty, demolitions. One day scouts came upon a huge tree the Hitlerites had cut down to block a road. Major's troops went to work on it with axes till Joe saw that an antitank mine had been uncovered in front of the tree. He asked if it could be disarmed. Sure, said Major, her battalion had been clearing mines for months. Joe shaped the explosive in a goat bladder, set it off with firing pins, and the tree blew apart, saving them an hour. “Okay, Yo!” was his congratulation. He was no longer the exotic mascot but now the radio-demolitions specialist of the battalion.

  * At least 7.5 million Red Army soldiers were killed by Germans, a staggering figure but one Stalin could better afford (with no loss of sleep) than Hitler, who lost three-quarters of his three million military KIA on the Eastern Front. By comparison (in all theaters), the British Commonwealth lost a half million, the United States about 300,000. Allied and Axis civilian deaths surpassed military by a factor of at least six, bringing the approximate total for World War II to 90 million, roughly a tenth of the world's population in 1937, if the war is considered to have begun with Japan's invasion of China.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BACK TO III-C

  JOE HAD ESCAPED TOWARD THE SOUTHEAST. MAJOR'S ADVANCE started in the opposite direction, part of Zhukov's mighty push to the Oder, Berlin being just fifty miles beyond the western bank. Now that Joe was fully integrated into her battalion she released him to ride on other tanks, which she rotated on point every day. While he was with them in Poland nearly all t
he battalion's casualties were from artillery and snipers, not frrefights. Almost daily some Hitlerite infantry were captured but in numbers too small for Major to report to regiment. One time eight were found holed up in a root cellar. They were brought out, stripped of their boots and overcoats; they were being herded to the rear when Major's tank came along. She asked the Mongols where the hell they were going.

  The answer was pretty lame. Like grade-schoolers caught smoking, the Mongols hadn't expected to be seen by Major. Their story was that the prisoners were being taken back for interrogation. This brought a laugh from the tankers—no one was interested in interrogating anymore, especially the likes of these miserable Hitlerites. Half of them were teenage or younger; the others looked like grandfathers. We don't bother to question this type, Major indicated, so why hadn't they been sent to Valhalla on the spot? she demanded to know.

  “I wish I'd understood the reason the three Mongols gave. They were teenage too. There was no doubt the Hitlerites would be executed, but the Mongols apparently had something extra in store for them. Major didn't approve, and I heard submachine-gun fire as soon as her tank moved out.

  “Snipers were the main problem as resistance began to wilt. Instead of a morale lift, my comrades became gloomy because a river was ahead, the Oder. So what, I said. We haven't fought a single tank. That's because the tanks are on the other side, Yo—that's the way the Hitlerites always fight.”