World War II: The Autobiography

by Jon E. Lewis

  In reality, neither man nor beast nor any other living thing paid us any honor and we didn’t have the opportunity to fire a single shot. The enemy always came from the air, and even when they flew very low, they were still beyond the range of our old Mausers. The spectacle of the war therefore rapidly became monotonous; day after day we saw the same scenes: civilians running to save themselves from air raids, convoys dispersing, trucks or carts on fire. The smell along the road was unchanging, too. It was the smell of dead horses that no one had bothered to bury and that stank to high heaven. We moved only at night and we learned to sleep while marching; smoking was forbidden out of fear that the glow of a cigarette could bring down on us the all-powerful Luftwaffe.

  It was a marvelous month, that September of 1939: mild, sunny, worthy of the end of an Italian summer, and we weren’t cold.

  Two weeks after our departure from Warsaw, when we had already gone well beyond Lublin, our leader suddenly ordered us to make an about-face. We were going back toward the west, toward Ghelm. What had happened? Had the miracle on the Vistula materialized? Were we finally going to protect the public buildings of Warsaw? In an army, orders are never explained – and the Polish Army was no exception to the rule. But along the roads, day or night, we were never alone; other soldiers and civilians were also on the march, and thanks to the ubiquitous rumor mill called in some parts of the West the “Arab telephone” and in the USSR “Radio Yerevan,” we learned that no miracle had taken place. We were heading west because the Russians were arriving from the east. And not to come to our aid, either, to fight “in a consistent manner against the Nazis” as my Communist brother’s old formula had it! “Stalin and his loyal comrades” were coming quite simply to gobble up their share of Poland.

  Rysiek, Jurek, and I were seized with consternation. If the Bolsheviks had become friends with the Nazis, then principles no longer mattered; there was no longer any hope for our poor Poland. On the other hand, why should we go to meet the Germans, who had attacked us first, rather than toward the Russians, who, as far as one could tell, were neither bombing nor destroying everything in their way? Should we talk to our leader about his decision? Such a step would certainly have yielded nothing and would have marked us as Communist sympathizers – which, in Poland, even at this moment of total disarray, could only lead to unfortunate results. What, then, if all three of us took off to try to join up with the Russians? But this solution didn't have much to recommend it, either. After much discussion, we decided that if there was a way out of the trap that enclosed us, it was still our commander who had some hope of finding it. So we followed him to the end, but we were bitterly disappointed at having been betrayed by all sides: by the Western powers, by the Russians, and by our own government, which had already bolted to Romania.

  While still marching, I began to sleep more and more deeply. I began to dream as if I were in bed. One night I saw the sky fill with countless Soviet squadrons. They were coming to deliver us from the Nazis, and our commander thanked them, as a comrade-in-arms who knows how to appreciate fraternal bravery and help. Even Sergeant Major Bartczak, a vitriolic anti-Bolshevik who never missed an opportunity to curse the Reds, ignoring the fact that it was the Germans who had attacked us, embraced the Russian tank drivers as they rolled down the road in their powerful armored vehicles. Bartczak cried out. “We are all part of the same Slav family.” Our Soviet liberators also had an enormous tank of fresh cream, which they were distributing generously, as if to show just how wrong my father had been to think that there wasn't any to be had under the Bolshevik regime.

  “Are you crazy or what?” Jurek asked, pulling me toward a gully as some Luftwaffe planes roared over our heads. According to Jurek, I replied that they were Soviet squadrons, but I don’t remember anything of this. Ever since this rudely interrupted dream of the great Russo-Polish antifascist reconciliation, however, I have talked in my sleep, and I even reply, apparently, to questions, just as if I were awake.

  We marched around in circles for one week more. Warsaw surrendered on September 27, but we continued our march until October 5, when we found ourselves encircled, along with some detachments of the regular army, by the Germans, near the village of Krzywda (Injustice). The Wehrmacht, for its own amusement or to encourage us to lay down our arms more quickly, sprayed us copiously with bursts of machine-gun fire and bombarded us with grenades. I caught something in the eye almost without noticing it, and without feeling any pain. My right eye simply closed and I could no longer open it except with the help of my fingers, by forcing the eyelid. I didn’t make a fuss about it, believing that it would pass, and I took part in all of the farewell ceremonies. A high-ranking Polish officer, a colonel or perhaps even a general, had been authorized by our German captors to make a speech to us in which he said that the war was not over, that the Polish Army, under the command of General Sikorski, fought on in France, and that our powerful Western allies were more than ever at our side. Our camp commander also came to say good-bye; the Germans were separating the officers from the NCOs and the rank-and-file troops.

  We were taken to Demblin Fortress, on the Vistula. I would spend ten days there before being sent to a hospital in Random. It wasn't a camp like the one I had seen in Jean Renoir’s film La Grande Illusion, replete with barracks, beds, and even a theater. In Demblin we were shut up in a large depot full of racks for arms – emptied, obviously – and were allowed out only to line up, in the rain, in front of an improvised, open-air kitchen. At night we arranged bunks as best we could with boards torn from the partitions and placed on the racks because, without them, there wouldn’t even have been enough space for everyone on the ground. Our bunks, however, had an unfortunate tendency to collapse, which often provoked a good deal of stumbling and swearing in the darkness. The Germans would arrive forthwith, hurling abuse and insults, the wealth and variety of which far exceeded anything I had learned at Skorupka High School. Blows struck with rifle butts landed here and there on the heads of these “polnische Schweinerhunde” but I was lucky enough to avoid them.

  On the same day that Karol was captured, Hitler held his victory parade in Warsaw, Poland’s fallen capital. Joseph Grigg, an American newspaperman, recorded:

  The whole center of the city had been laid in ruins by the two-day fury of the German bombardment and air bombing. Dead horses still lay rotting in the parks, their carcasses half hacked up by starving Polish troops during the siege. New graves bulged the grass along side street car tracks. Bomb craters made it difficult to drive along some of the main streets. The brand new central railway station was scarcely recognizable. The Polish population looked bewildered and stunned.

  For an hour we stood alongside Hitler as tank after tank, motorized infantry, guns, and more tanks thundered past along the tree-lined avenue where most of the foreign embassies and legations are situated. No Pole saw that victory parade. The street where Hitler stood and those along which the gray German columns rolled had been cordoned off and no Pole was allowed nearer than a block distant. The tanks were clean and in parade-ground condition. The troops were fresh and clear-eyed. The dull steel armor of the new Nazi Wehrmacht had scarcely been dented by its first blitz campaign.

  Later that afternoon on the Warsaw airport a dozen or so foreign newspapermen were presented to Hitler. His face was pallid and unhealthy-looking but his mood was that of a triumphant conqueror.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “you have seen the ruins of Warsaw. Let that be a warning to those statesmen in London and Paris who still think of continuing this war.”

  With a quick Nazi salute he turned from us and walked towards the plane that was to carry him back to Berlin.

  FINLAND: GUERILLA WAR IN THE SNOW, 2 FEBRUARY 1940

  Virginia Cowles

  The Soviet Union invaded Finland on 30 November 1939. The main attack fell on the “waist” of Finland in the Suomussalmi area and on the Karelian Isthmus, and was intended to crack the fortified Mannerheim Line. Despite being outnumbered
5 to 1, Finnish troops resisted until 12 March 1940, taking – by virtue of superior tactics and training – 200,000 Russian lives for the loss of 25,000 Finns. Cowles was a reporter for The Sunday Times and New York Herald Tribune.

  Here in the slender waistline of Finland some of the fiercest fighting of the war is taking place. During the last two months more than 100,000 Russian troops have crossed the frontier, in this sector alone, in repeated attempts to cut Finland in two.

  The Finns have succeeded in repulsing the onslaught with some of the most spectacular fighting in history. They have annihilated entire divisions and hurled back others thirty and forty miles to the border from whence they came. They have done it not by ordinary methods of trench warfare but by desperate guerilla fighting.

  To understand how the Finnish soldiers, hopelessly outnumbered, have stemmed the heavy Russian advance, you must picture a country of thick snow-covered forests and ice-bound roads. You must visualize heavily armed ski patrols sliding ghostlike through the woods, cutting their communications until entire battalions are isolated, then falling on them in furious surprise attacks. This is a war in which skis have outmanoeuvred tanks, sleds competed with lorries, and knives even challenged rifles.

  I have just returned from a trip to a front-line position on the Finnish-Russian frontier, where I saw the patrols at work and had my first taste of Soviet artillery fire. I left the small town which serves as General Headquarters for the north-central front with four English and American correspondents and a young Finnish Army lieutenant.

  We started off with the idea of perhaps accompanying one of the Finnish border patrols on a quick jaunt into Russia and back. Not that any of us imagined that the frozen Russian landscape would prove interesting but we all thought it would be fun to step into the Soviet Union without the formality of getting a visa.

  We left at four o’clock in the morning, hoping to arrive at the front before dawn, but the roads were so slippery that our car skidded into the ditch three times, which delayed us considerably but gave us a small idea of what the mechanized Russian units are up against. We arrived near the village of Suomussalmi just as dawn was breaking and here I witnessed the most ghastly spectacle I have ever seen.

  It was in this sector that the Finns, a little over a month ago, annihilated two Russian divisions of approximately 30,000 men. The road along which we drove was still littered with frozen Russian corpses, and the forests on either side are now known as “Dead Man’s Land”. Perhaps it was the beauty of the morning that made the terrible Russian debacle all the more ghastly when we came upon it. The rising sun had drenched the snow-covered forest, and the trees like lace Valentines, with a strange pink light that seemed to glow for miles. The landscape was marred only by the charred framework of a house; then an overturned truck and two battered tanks.

  Then we turned a bend in the road and came upon the full horror of the scene. For four miles the road and forests were strewn with the bodies of men and horses; with wrecked tanks, field kitchens, trucks, gun carriages, maps, books and articles of clothing. The corpses were frozen as hard as petrified wood, and the colour of the skin was mahogany. Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other like a heap of rubbish, covered only by a merciful blanket of snow; others were sprawled against the trees in grotesque attitudes.

  All were frozen in the positions in which they huddled. I saw one with his hands clasped to a wound in his stomach; another struggling to open the collar of his coat, and a third pathetically clasping a cheap landscape drawing, done in bright childish colours, which had probably been a prized possession that he had tried to save when he fled into the woods.

  What these troops must have suffered in the cold is not difficult to imagine. They were wearing only ordinary knitted hoods with steel helmets over them, and none of them had his gloves on. This is accounted for by the fact that the Russians do not wear “trigger-finger” mittens such as the Finns do; they wear only ordinary mittens which they must take off to fire their rifles.

  Some miles further we arrived at our destination. A white-clad sentry stepped out of the forest into the roadway and motioned us to stop. The car was backed into a clearing between the trees and as we followed our guide through the twisting paths, the woods suddenly became alive with stalwart Finnish soldiers with only their black rifles visible against the snow, moving noiselessly in and out among the trees.

  The major’s hut was built of logs half underground and covered with snow. The camouflage was so clever that the only indication we had was by the skis stacked up against the trees. We crawled in the shelter, which was furnished with two beds, a long desk covered with maps, and a small stove that kept the temperature at thirty degrees.

  The major greeted us warmly and told us breakfast was ready; he motioned us towards a table laden with coffee, bread and butter, reindeer meat, cheese and pickled fish. A few minutes later we were interrupted by the whine of an engine, which broke into a loud roar as a Russian plane passed only a few hundred feet above our heads. The major said the Russian planes patrolled the forests for several hours each day and often did a considerable amount of machine-gunning. “That’s what we want,” he said. “Planes.”

  Then he asked us if we thought the outside world would send any to Finland and searched our faces eagerly for our replies. “If only,” he murmured, “it were possible for some kind old ladies to knit us some aeroplanes and crochet us some anti-tank guns. We should be very happy.”

  When we asked him if there was any possibility of our sneaking across the frontier into Russia he smiled and said he would send us up to the observation post, where we could have a look at the situation, and if we still wanted to go, it was ours for the asking. He then detailed a captain to look after us.

  The captain’s hut was some distance away; it was made of beaver-board built around the trunk of a tree so that the smoke from the stove would be diffused by the thick branches. The captain was a gay fellow who showed us with great relish the huge Russian samovar that he had captured in the Suomussalmi battle. He also had a pair of field glasses he had taken from a Russian officer, but his most prized possession was a machine-gun from a Russian tank. He said that every time a plane went by he took a pot shot at it, adding that it wasn’t exactly his business but with the gun so handy it was difficult to resist.

  The captain led us through the woods to the observation post. It was some distance away and we were accompanied by a ski patrol of eight men equipped with rifles and wicked-looking machine pistols. They slipped in and out through the trees like ghosts, managing their skis with astonishing agility. One moment they slipped behind the trees and we thought they were lost; a few seconds later they were on the path in front of us.

  The observation post consisted merely of a shallow pit dug in the snow; in it there was an observer with a pair of field glasses and a telephone. But we did not need glasses to see the Soviet Union. Only three hundred yards away across an icebound lake, lay the frozen landscape of Russia.

  We had been in the pit only a few minutes when the Finnish soldiers in our rear opened up artillery fire. A fountain of ice and snow shot up as several shells fell in the lake. The observation officer corrected the range and soon they were disappearing neatly into the trees on the other side. The Russians were not slow to reply, and a few minutes later the air resounded to the nasty whine of three-inch shells, and the pine trees were singing with the moan of grenades and the dull thud of mortars.

  Twice, tree branches chipped by grenades fell down on us, and when two shells landed uncomfortably close, wounding two Finnish soldiers, the captain declared we had better go back to the hut.

  Before we left he gave us a cup of tea. While we were drinking it a husky Finnish soldier crawled into the shelter. His cheeks were red with the cold but his blue eyes shone with excitement. He had just come in from a five-hour patrol behind the Russian lines and had penetrated as far back as three miles. He took out a map and explained to the captain the various changes in t
he enemy positions.

  We learned that the boy was a farmer in ordinary life, but had distinguished himself as one of the bravest men in the patrol. The captain said that during the Suomussalmi battle he had destroyed a tank by jumping on top of it, prising the lid open with a crow-bar, and throwing a hand grenade inside.

  When the boy departed another Finnish soldier came into the hut to say that a Russian patrol of two hundred men was heading toward the Finnish lines. The captain ordered him to start with a detachment and meet them on the way.

  We could see that things were going to be pretty busy soon, so we decided that it was best to leave. Outside the hut a group of soldiers were already strapping on their rifles and adjusting their skis. When we shook hands with the captain he said: “Well, what about Russia? If you want to join the patrol just starting out, you have my permission.”

  We thanked him very much, but I for one said I was quite happy where I was.

  Meanwhile, the “Phoney War” or “Sitzkrieg” between Germany and the Allies came to an abrupt end on the morning of 9 April 1940 when Germany launched a full-scale invasion of neutral Norway, principally to gain control of the iron-ore port of Kiruna and secure Atlantic bases for her U-boats. Overwhelmed, the Norwegian government requested military aid from Britain and France. Between 18 and 23 April 12,000 Allied troops were put ashore. The German navy suffered a sharp defeat at Narvik, losing ten destroyers to the Royal Navy and a large part of its invasion force, the survivors making a fighting retreat to the Swedish border under General Died. Elsewhere, German invasion troops, landing by sea and air, were almost entirely successful, helped in part by Norwegian pro-Nazis fifth columnists. The campaign in Norway was brought to a premature end in May when the Allies withdrew their troops through Narvik to stem the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg in France.