by Hans Werner
Memory is not infallible, and as Ulrich Neisser suggests it is “not like playing back a tape or looking at a picture.” He concludes that “some memory stories do achieve a kind of stability—especially if they have been frequently repeated—but their accuracy cannot be presumed simply because they are vivid and clear.”11 My probing of my father’s stories with the aim of placing them accurately in a chronological sequence in the greater narrative of the Second World War disrupted the script that my father had maintained for years. Attempts to rescript his memory tended only to raise other problems of chronological sequencing. Anchoring one story in the Second World War timeline based on some recognizable aspect invariably forced other stories he told out of sequence. Clearly he joined threads of stories together in ways that while true, in the sense that he experienced them, did not fit together with the events of the war of which they were a part.
My father’s stories were also never challenged or mediated by others who had the same or similar experiences. Memories and the stories that arise from them are often collaborative projects, undertaken in the presence of others who experienced the same events, though from different perspectives. Siblings in a family, a husband and wife, or comrades offer the best examples. My father told these stories for more than forty years, and in all that time there was no one to challenge his memories. He was completely separated from anyone who shared these experiences and with whom he might have been forced to collaborate in creating his narrative.
It is also apparent that the period between the summer of 1942 and the fall of 1944 was comprised of intense activity for Johann and that he participated in dramatic and life-threatening events. Although speculative to some extent, a reconstruction of the time period illustrates the frenetic pace of his life during these years. In June 1942, he got his driver’s licence and sometime after that began working for Carl Leib; in November 1942, he became a German citizen. He might have made a trip to the east with clothes for the troops with Carl Leib’s truck in January 1943 and then went on the abortive trip to Africa in April of that year. Johann then spent a few weeks in Venice during the early summer of 1943 before returning to Czechoslovakia to be drafted into the German Army. As a member of his first unit, he likely made a trip to Paris in the fall of 1943 and then was sent to the eastern front with supplies in January 1944, where he was wounded. He spent the late winter of 1944 in the hospital in Prague before going to the farm in Bavaria in April. In July 1944, Johann was heading back to his unit only to be dispatched to the western front, where he took part in the retreat through Paris in August. By September, he was back in Pilsen for the formation of the Heeres Artillerie Brigade 401.
The stories of experiences after his capture by the Germans represented a careful negotiation between what my father remembered and the desire to guard the image of the person he wanted to portray to his listeners. Given these constraints, it is not surprising that his memory linked events that occurred at different times, that he confused locations of events, and that he conflated time. As Geoffrey Cubitt puts it, “remembering seems indissolubly coupled with forgetting... a quest for points of recognition across territory of the more or less forgotten whose features we never succeed in bringing into stable focus.”12
There was also the opportunity to create artifacts of memory from other sources. My father mentioned seeing the Wochenschau, a weekly propaganda newsreel shown in theatres before the feature film of the night. The newsreels “reported” on the events of the war and offered dramatic visual footage and commentary. It is likely that what he saw and heard interfered with, and in some cases supplanted, memories of his experiences.
Finally the pursuit of documentary evidence to corroborate his stories brought to light information on his personal relationships that also shed light on how my father told his stories of this period. He seems not to have been able to incorporate all that he experienced into the autobiographical person he wanted to project. His military record extract indicates that his home address was: Ehefrau (wife) Frieda Werner, Babianitz Krs. Lask, Wiesengasse 6. Based on this fragment of information, my father must have remarried sometime in 1942 or 1943 while he was in the Warthegau. He never mentioned being married a second time during his time in German-occupied Poland. The only other reference to a relationship with a woman named Frieda came in difficult conversations with my mother much later. During the weeks after my father’s death in 2003, my mother in her grief mentioned that, when she first met Johann after the war, he carried a photo of an attractive woman named Frieda. At the time, Johann had been interested in my mother’s half-sister, Tina. When my mother and father began courting, the photo disappeared, and they never discussed Frieda again. The autobiographical person my father wanted to create for his listeners did not allow for that story to be told and must have interfered with his stories of the experiences of that period.
8
The 401
The aim of locating my father’s story within the bigger story of the events of the Second World War was easier to achieve for the period between when Johann became part of the Heeres Artillerie Brigade (mot.) 401 in September 1944 and his capture by Allied forces in April 1945. The 401 was the only unit my father had clear memories of belonging to. In fact, listening to his stories of being a German soldier, it seemed he was part of the 401 for all that time.
His memories of the period when he was active on the front were never specific with reference to the larger story of the war. Only a general sense of the battles, times, and places in which my father participated could be gained from them. He did, however, have a story about the process of the 401 being assembled and then becoming an active unit. As he explained it, when a soldier was sent somewhere, he had to report to the army reporting centre in that area. In the formal interviews, he conveyed the sense of losing the power to decide where one was going. As he put it, “they just told you when the train left for a certain place, gave you a card, and you packed your backpack, and away you went.”1 In his case, he arrived at Strassitz and then was sent to Pilsen, where the 401 was being assembled. The unit needed Zugmaschine drivers, and he was one of them.
After being transferred to Pilsen, Johann’s battalion was outfitted with new equipment, and they began a month of training together as a unit. Here Johann also met a fellow soldier, Zachada, with whom he participated in many adventures and occasionally trouble. When I pressed my father for this friend’s identity, he could only recall that he was from Czechoslovakia, that his family was somehow connected to the name of the large arms manufacturer koda, that they always called him Zachada, and that his last name could have been Miller or something like that.
Sometime in the fall, the newly assembled unit became active. They all assembled at the train station, where their equipment was loaded, and off they went. Ordinary soldiers were usually not told exactly where they were headed and did not travel in great comfort. It was already cold, and Johann and the others sat in their machines and kept warm by using Esbit heaters. They were headed toward France, and the train travelled only at night and was occasionally delayed for a few hours while the track was repaired.2
I recall my father telling a story about the process of loading the trains that had more detail than the above anecdote taken from the formal interviews. Entraining the inexperienced unit was a mass of confusion, and many of the Zugmaschine drivers were not up to driving their large machines up the narrow ramps onto the train cars. An officer was yelling and swearing at the delays, so Johann offered to drive all the remaining machines onto the rail cars. He jumped into one machine after another, and soon the entire battery’s Zugmaschines were loaded. The officer promoted him on the spot to the rank of gefreiter (“lance corporal”) and assured him he would soon get his new shoulder patches. The promotion never happened, and he remained an ordinary soldier for the remainder of the war.
Along with stories of specific events, my father frequently offered explanations of various details of equipment and military procedures. As he e
xplained, an artillery unit was seldom right on the front lines of a battle. In the German army system, half-tracks, such as the Zugmaschine driven by Johann, pulled cannons into specified firing positions some distance from the battle line. A battery’s group of six cannons had a maximum range of fifteen to twenty kilometres, which meant the firing position was within that distance of the target.3 From the battery’s firing position, a cable was rolled out on the ground toward the main battle line by a tracked motorcycle. The cable provided communication between the forward observer and the firing officer. The forward observer provided target data and checked that the shells were on target. In the early part of their time on the western front, the unit made use of a reconnaissance aircraft, a Fiseler Storch, which served in the role of forward observer. My father’s fascination with airplanes meant the Storch made frequent appearances in his stories. In one anecdote that reinforced his fascination with airplanes, my father recalled with fondness servicing the plane and making friends with the pilot. The pilot occasionally took Johann along on a reconnaissance flight, but eventually the flights were stopped because of Allied domination of the skies, and a ground observer became the only method of artillery observation.4
After the Zugmaschine had pulled the cannon into place, it left the firing position to park in what was called the trossraum. This rear area was some distance behind the firing position and was where equipment was maintained and supplies and ammunition were assembled to support the unit in battle. Johann spent most of his time in this rear area. As my father explained, even though he was the driver of a machine that pulled cannons, he was also a mechanic and could be stationed at one place for two weeks or more. In these rear areas, his machine, which had a mounted anti-aircraft gun, was parked somewhere to protect a potential target, such as an airport. The cannons were large, and all he could remember was that their calibre was “twelve something.” He seemed to recall they could fire a shell at targets up to forty kilometres away with the “eighth charge.”5
Johann worked as a mechanic in a large tent, and when the battle line began to encroach on the firing positions, or when they were discovered and targeted by the opposing artillery or aircraft, the Zugmaschine drivers had to make their way to the firing positions to get the cannons and transport them to new firing positions. This was the most dangerous time for a Zugmaschine driver since shifting firing positions often occurred under enemy fire or when the enemy was nearby.
One of my father’s stories involved the process of laying the cable for the ground observer. A soldier named Schneider drove the tracked motorcycle that rolled out the wire toward the battle line. An officer from his battery ordered Johann to have a look at the motorcycle because Schneider was not making it to the battle line with the cable—the motorcycle was always breaking down. Johann looked it over and, aside from making some minor adjustments, determined there was nothing wrong with it. The officer then suggested that Johann accompany Schneider to the firing positions to make sure he got there. They drove the motorcycle to where the cannons were set up without incident, but upon arriving there they were advised to immediately dig foxholes because the positions might come under fire at any time. They each dug a foxhole near to, but not right next to, each other. They had just finished when enemy artillery shells began to land on their location. When it was over, Johann emerged from his foxhole to find that nothing was left of Schneider or his foxhole. There were just shreds of clothing and body parts hanging from nearby trees. A shell had scored a direct hit on his foxhole. My father believed that Schneider had had a premonition that his “number was up” and intentionally rigged his motorcycle so he would not make it to the front. Johann was able to recover Schneider’s watch, and he inquired about and noted his home address. He kept the watch until the end of the war, and after his release he looked up the Schneider family. They lived in a large house in Wurzburg, and Schneider had been their only son. The older couple invited Johann into their home, served him tea, and had a brief conversation about their son and how he had died.
The story of Schneider’s death illustrated a common characteristic of my father’s war stories. It was told without emotion, matter-of-factly. One could not discern from the way my father told this horrible story whether Schneider had been a friend or barely an acquaintance. The event seemed to leave a mark on his emotions, since he took the trouble to visit Schneider’s parents long after it. Layers of repetitive storytelling seem to have insulated him from the emotions he experienced at the time and some time thereafter. The story of Schneider’s death was also somewhat unusual in that it was told in the context of seeing many other acquaintances die, both before and after Schneider. It seems that the arbitrary nature of his death—both had been in the same situation, in foxholes beside each other, with each having an equal chance of being killed—made the event memorable. My father survived, and Schneider did not.
Although my father never distinguished times of rest and refit from his other stories, there were clearly times when his unit was not directly engaged in combat. It was probably during such a time that Zachada and Johann decided, given the meagre soldier’s rations and notoriously bad cooking, to find their own stock of food. They raided the smokehouses of local farmers and arrived back in camp with arms loaded with sausages. Needless to say, they were severely reprimanded for their adventure.
“When we were in the Schnee Eiffel for the big attack” signalled a story of my father’s participation in what I would later come to understand was what Americans referred to as the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium and Luxembourg. In his memory, they drove two nights and two days to get to Belgium. My father recalled the road being called “Napolean’s Strasse,” and they drove only during the night; during the day, they hid the machines. He remembered getting to their positions at 10:00 p.m., only two hours before the midnight deadline, and “at twelve o’clock the thunder began.”6
Map 5. Movements of the 401 Artillery Brigade, 1943-45.
In other accounts, my father remembered more graphically the scream of the German rocket launchers known as nebelwerfer and vividly recalled the impressive thunder of the artillery. The rocket launchers with their eight rocket-loaded tubes made a terrible noise when they were launched.7 The opening days of the battle were successful for the German Army, and they advanced for ten days before beginning to falter. On Christmas day, Johann, along with two others and the unit’s doctor, took the Zugmaschine to get supplies from abandoned American depots not far from where they were. They came across a large warehouse filled with “chocolates, chocolate bars, these big boxes of food stuffs, rows of tanks were parked there, not one of them had moved.” Johann and those with him loaded the entire machine with K-rations; “that was our Christmas present. Hitler had said that if we wanted a Christmas present we could go and get it from the Americans.” The battle went well for a few days after that, but then the Germans ran out of fuel, and the advance had not made it as far as the fuel dumps.8
Likely it was on one of these days, while they had camouflaged their units in the forest, that the Zugmaschine drivers watched as American airplanes strafed a truck convoy along the road in front of the forest where they were encamped. A German anti-aircraft gun nearby fired at an Allied fighter–bomber, which immediately crashed near them. The plane came down so hard that the engine separated and rolled some distance away from the rest of the wreckage. Nothing had happened to the pilot, who got out immediately and seemed intent on destroying what was left of the plane with some kind of pistol. Johann and his fellow drivers yelled at the surprised pilot, who had thought he was alone, and made him sit down on a nearby tree stump until he could be taken away. They spoke German to him, and Johann noticed that, while he spoke poorly, he answered in recognizable Mennonite Low German, and he learned that he had a Mennonite name and was from Canada. Johann visited with him, explaining he would be a prisoner of war and assuring him he would be treated well. He “told him there he would be wearing a tie, pressed pants,
” and the food would all come from Switzerland. The pilot asked Johann to retrieve a package from the airplane that had “cigarettes, soap, chocolate, a few chocolate bars, and other things to eat,” which he then distributed. After some time, two officers, one of whom spoke English, arrived in a jeep and took the pilot away.9
There were dangerous moments in the Ardennes battles. According to one version of my father’s stories, his unit received a new commander whose inexperience resulted in their battery remaining in its firing positions too long. The American artillery had fired a targeting round at them during the day, and then at night the firing positions of the battery came under heavy shelling. Four of the six cannons survived. Johann loaded his half-track with a number of wounded soldiers who had been concealed behind a haystack. He was finally able to make it to a medical station, but by the time he got there most of them had died. He took the bodies to a bombed-out schoolhouse, where another hundred soldiers had died. After unloading the bodies, Johann drove his machine into a small river, where he used a shovel and river water to wash off the blood and gore. In my father’s memory, some thirty soldiers from his battery were killed that day.