Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (76 page)

Meanwhile the battalions of the 2nd and 3rd Mountain Divisions were in the front line, unrelieved and without

adequate food-supplies. Would they be able to hold out? Would it be possible under such conditions to hang on to the forward winter positions? The battalions, which had been in -action there since June, were exhausted and bled white. The men were finished, physically as well as psychologically. With a heavy heart the German High Command therefore decided to withdraw the two divisions from the front and replace them by Major-General Schörner's reinforced 6th Mountain Division. At the time the decision was taken Schörner's men from Innsbruck were still in Greece. In the spring of 1941 they had burst through the "Metaxas Line," overcome Greek resistance along the Mount Olympus range, stormed Larissa in conjunction with the Viennese 2nd Panzer Division, taken Athens, and finally fought in Crete.

These men had then been switched from the Mediterranean to the extreme north, into the winter positions in the Litsa bridgehead. In the autumn of 1941 Schörner's Austrian Mountain Jägers would have been more than welcome before Leningrad or Moscow. The fact that Hitler dispatched them not to these sectors, but to the northernmost corner of the Eastern Front, proves the German Command's determination not to yield an inch of ground outside Murmansk. On that sector there could be, there must be, no retreat. The enormous volume of American aid to the Soviet Union, which had since begun flowing, lent Murmansk new and vital importance.

Whereas at the beginning of the war Hitler had viewed the capture of Murmansk merely as the elimination of a threat to the vital ore-mines and the Arctic Ocean road, it was now a case of seizing a port of vital importance to the outcome of the war, and the railway-line serving that port. The German starting-line, the springboard for a new offensive against Murmansk, must therefore be held.

On 8th October the new bridge at Parkkina was finished— two days ahead of schedule. It was named the "Prince Eugene Bridge," after Eugene of Savoy, as a tribute to the Austrian Mountain troops who made up the bulk of General Dietl's Mountain Corps.

Long columns of supply vehicles had been held up on the Arctic Ocean road for weeks. Now they could start moving again.

But it seemed as if there was a jinx on that sector of the front. Winter came surprisingly early—as, indeed, everywhere else on the Eastern Front. Only up there it started with a frightful Arctic gale. By the evening of 9th October all movement to the front had come to a standstill. Drivers who tried to defy the weather and get their lorries through were buried under snowdrifts and suffocated by their exhaust gases. Columns of porters lost their way and froze to death. Even the reindeer refused to budge. First Lieutenant Eichhorn's Company was stuck in front of the bridge.

In the front line the failure of supplies to arrive had terrible consequences. The men were starved, they were cold, and they were out of ammunition. The condition of the wounded was frightful. There were not enough bearers to take them out of the line quickly. Horses and mules were also badly affected.

Major Hess, the Quartermaster of the Mountain Corps Norway, reports in his book
Arctic Ocean Front, 1941
that the draught horses of 388th Infantry Regiment and those of 1st Battalion, 214th Artillery Regiment, in particular, were not up to the hardships. Within a few weeks 1400 horses died. Of the small Greek mules brought by Schorner's newly arrived division not a single one survived the hell of the tundra.

Nevertheless the Litsa front held out. The Austrian Jägers stood up to the Arctic winter, which hit then" front eight weeks earlier than it did the divisions before Moscow. At long last their relief came. The companies of Schorner's 6th Mountain Division, which had taken over from 2nd and 3rd Mountain Divisions at the end of October, moved into the positions in the Litsa bridgehead and along the Titovka.

To hand over this difficult sector of the front, right up in the polar night, to a unit which had only just come from the sunny south and had no idea about living and fighting conditions in the extreme north was one of the most risky experiments of the whole war.

In long columns, moving in single file, the companies trudged through the snow between the lakes and up on to the granite plateau. The snow was a foot deep. The temperature was already 10 degrees below zero.

Near the front the men encountered heavily wrapped figures —NCOs detailed to take the new units to their positions. There was much waving of arms and subdued shouting. Careful there—the Russians are only a few hundred yards farther on. Now and again a Russian flare rose into the air and a few bursts of machine-gun fire swept over the ground.

"Follow me!" Behind the NCOs the platoons moved off in different directions, and presently split up into sections. Thus the whole marching column vanished into nothingness. Where were they being taken?

Lance-corporal Sailer, with eight men from Innsbruck, was trudging through the snow behind his guide. "Where the hell is that man taking us?" he muttered. The guide merely grunted and a moment later stopped. "Here we are."

A massive granite boulder with a machine-gun on top. Behind it a few miserable caves made from piled-up stones, lined with moss and roofed over with pine-branches, with smaller stones on top and a frozen tarpaulin over the entrance.

These were their fighting positions and living quarters for the whiter.

The Jägers were speechless. No dug-out, no pill-box, no trench, no continuous front line. And their cave was not high enough for a man to stand upright, but only just big enough for the men to cower close to one another. That was the winter line in the Litsa bridgehead.

That then was journey's end. They had come from sundrenched Athens, from the Acropolis, from the market-place of humanity; they had driven right across Europe, sailed through the Gulf of Bothnia and marched along the 400 miles of Arctic Ocean road from Rovaniemi.

Others had come by ship up the coast of Northern Norway, until the British had caught them off Hammerfest and chased them into the fjords. From there they had marched to Kirkenes, along road No. 50, foot-slogging it for over 300 miles. And now they were in the tundra before Murmansk, swallowed up by the polar night.

With a few whispered words of advice the emaciated figures of 2nd and 3rd Mountain Divisions handed over to them. "You're sure to get some material for living quarters and better dug-outs," they comforted them. Then they packed their rucksacks and with a sigh of relief moved off, into the night. Many of them, especially the battalions of 3rd Mountain Division, went back along the same long road, the Arctic Ocean road south to Rovaniemi, which their comrades of the 6th had travelled in the opposite direction. Only the reinforced 139th Mountain Jäger Regiment remained behind in the area of Mountain Corps Norway, as an Army reserve. Thus it was spared the nightmarish journey along the Arctic Ocean road to the south. For by then winter had started in earnest and the trek to Southern Lapland was torture.

The Arctic Ocean road was the lifeline of the fighting front. All traffic moving away from the front had to give way to traffic moving up. As a result, only one battalion moved south each day, always with predetermined destinations and bivouacs. Everything moved on foot: only the baggage went by vehicle. The guns, taken to pieces, infantry weapons, and ammunition stayed with the marching men and horses.

General Klatt, then Lieutenant-Colonel Klatt and in command of 138th Mountain Jäger Regiment, gives the following account of this trek in the divisional records of 3rd Mountain Division: "Once we had reached the tree-line the worst was over. Now at last each day ended at a blazing camp-fire. These were a great help also to our emaciated animals, the first of which began to collapse after about ten days. What was to be done? We lifted their shivering bodies off the ground, collected enough wood to light a fire, and supported the animal's weakened flanks until it was warm again and could stand on its own feet. If it then returned to its accustomed place among the other animals we knew that we had outwitted death this time. We succeeded quite often, but by no means always, and it was invariably touch and go—a matter of a few minutes— whether we could save our dumb, shaggy friends." Beyond Ivalot came the first Lapp settlements, and then Finnish farmhouses. The soldiers down from the Arctic saw the first electric light again, children playing, reindeer sleighs, and the Rova-niemi railway. A last forced march, and the Gulf of Bothnia came into sight.

They had reached their objective.

The 24th anniversary of the Socialist October Revolution —which, under the Gregorian calendar since introduced, falls on 7th November—was marked in Moscow by the German assault on the capital. The Soviet metropolis was starving and shivering. Marauders roamed the streets. Special courts were sitting.

The 8th and 9th November had been declared ordinary working days, in view of the situation. Only on the 7th were short celebrations to be held. The traditional mass rally of the Moscow City Soviet on the eve of the anniversary had been transferred below ground: at the lowest level of the Mayakovskiy station of the Moscow Metro, Stalin addressed the Party and the Red Army. He invoked victory and demanded loyalty and obedience.

In the morning of 7th November military formations on their way to the front inarched across the snow-covered Red Square, past Stalin. Stalin was standing on top of the Lenin Mausoleum—where later his own embalmed body was to lie for seven years—and saluted the Army units which were trudging in silence through the falling snow. All round the square countless AA guns had been emplaced for fear of a German air-raid. But Goering's Luftwaffe did not show up.

Some 1600 miles away from Moscow, on the icy front before Murmansk, the commander of the Soviet 10th Rifle Division decided to mark the 24th anniversary of the Revolution in a very special way: he wanted to make Stalin a present of a victory.

During the night of 6th/7th November Corporal Andreas Brandner in strongpoint K3 put his hand to his ear. The easterly wind was carrying across the noise of singing and hilarious revelry. From the Soviet positions the strains of the Internationale wafted across time and again.

The corporal made a "special incident" report to Company. The company commander telephoned Battalion. Suspicion and caution were called for: when the Russians had vodka to drink it usually boded nothing good. Were they merely celebrating, or was this the prelude to an attack?

By 0400 hours the men knew the answer: the Soviets were coming. With shouts of "Urra" a regiment charged against K3, and another against K4. The Siberians fought fanatically. They got inside the German artillery barrage. They gained a foothold on two unoccupied commanding heights immediately in front of the German positions.

By immediate counter-attacks the Russians were dislodged —except from one conical rock in front of K3. There an assault-party and hand-grenade battle was fought for the next few weeks, a kind of operation typical of this sector. It was reminiscent of the assault-party operations at Verdun and in the Dolomites during the First World War.

The Siberians were established under cover of an overhanging slab just below the summit of the rock, in the dead angle barely 10 yards below the German defenders. It was impossible to get at them with small arms or artillery. The hand-grenade was the only effective weapon in the circumstances.

Time and again, like cats, the Siberians would scramble up the overhang on their side and appear right in front of the small German strongpoint. They would fire their sub-machine-guns and charge the defenders. There would be hand- to-hand fighting, with rifle-butt, trenching-tool, and bayonet.

This kind of fighting continued for five days. The outcrop of granite was soon known as "hand-grenade rock." The men of 2nd Battalion, 143rd Jäger Regiment, climbing up on the German side to relieve their colleagues, would ask themselves anxiously: Shall I be walking down again on my own two feet, or shall I be carried on a stretcher? During that short period the German defenders threw 5000 hand-grenades and the Russians left 350 killed in front of their lines.

After that the period of hibernation set in also on the Litsa bridgehead until mid-December 1941. Similarly, at the neck of the Rybachiy Peninsula, where the Machine-gun Battalions 13 and 14, as well as companies of the 388th Infantry Regiment, 214th Infantry Division, were in position, nothing much happened. The Arctic winter, now at its height, did not permit any major operations. The snow was lying many feet deep, and an icy blizzard swept over rocks and through the valleys. Only patrols kept the war alive.

The German troops cut down the telegraph-poles of the Russian line to Murmansk and burnt them in the simple stoves

which had since arrived. The Russians retaliated by attacks on sentries and columns of porters.

On 21st December, three days before Christmas Eve, the Soviet winter offensive which had been in full swing on the main front for the past fortnight opened also in the extreme north. The Soviet 10th Rifle Division, since promoted to Guards status for its attacks on the Revolution anniversary, as well as the 3rd and 12th Naval Brigades, once more charged against K3, and presently also against K4 and K5. That was on the sector of 143rd Jäger Regiment.