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Praetorium Honoris

Sunday, January 16, 2022

The Second Day, Near Łódź

(Source)
Schütze¹ Jürgen von Lüttwitz was hunkered down, grimacing as Polish machine gun fire whipped over his head. He had been told that the Poles would be an easy victory, seems that someone had forgotten to tell the Poles!

"Unteroffizier Hartmann! Shouldn't we try to flank this position, we'll be here all day if we don't maneuver!" von Lüttwitz yelled over at his sergeant, who turned to him with a grin.

"Regular Clausewitz aren't you Junge? For your information, we're expecting visitors at any moment! Now shut up and keep your head down!" Hartmann knew the men were impatient and scared. It wouldn't take much to make them run. His job, as he saw it, was to keep them focused on staying alive.

Looking at his watch one more time, Hartmann wondered where the damned Luftwaffe was.


Elżbieta Chlebek gasped as another explosion rocked the stopped train. She could hear the roar of German aircraft passing down the line, machine guns chattering, bombs falling, her world was a sea of heat and smoke.

The door at the back of the car slammed open, the conductor, his uniform bloodied, and his head bare, yelled out, "Everybody off the train, get into the woods if you can! Move, move!"

She grabbed her bag, one of the men yelled at her to leave it, she ignored him, the bag contained her medical supplies. As a medical student she was fully prepared to help anyone who was injured.

As she scrambled off the train, she noticed that there were already a number of injured people. Some were trying to get to cover, some of those were limping badly. She also noticed that some people were on the ground, some not moving. She went to help the nearest when she felt a hand pull at her shawl.

"I told you to leave the bag, missy!"

She turned and kneed the man in the groin, he appeared to be some sort of railway official, no doubt used to having his way with passengers. As he grabbed his crotch and dropped to his knees, another man stepped to her side.

"What are you doing Miss? You need to get to cover!"

She noted that the man was an officer in the army, before saying, "I'm a medical student, these people need help!"

He pulled her arm, leading her to the nearby trees, "After the battle Miss, if you stay in the open, you too will need help!"

She let herself be led away, she could hear that the Germans were returning. The sounds of the aircraft engines, the whistle of bombs, and the machine gun fire were approaching rapidly. As were the sounds of the screams of those being attacked.


Von Lüttwitz buried his head below the lip of the shell hole. The earth was quaking and moving as if trying to throw him into the air, which was filled with steel fragments from the attacking aircraft.

The aerial attack on the Polish positions seemed to last forever as the German infantry hugged the earth, waiting for the whistles of their officers to get them advancing again.

Von Lüttwitz's hearing slowly returned, he could hear Hartmann shouting at the squad to get up and move. He arose from the shell hole, his K98k rifle at the ready, bayonet fixed, advancing towards the Polish positions. He realized that at some point he had wet his trousers. He was still trembling, no wonder his father and uncles had said little of their experiences during the Great War.

As they advanced, the Polish positions seemed to be deserted, he looked to his corporal, Hermann Rösch, and asked, "Have they fled?"

"No, probably just pulled back to their main position, these are temporary field works, meant to slow us down ... Damn it!" Rösch raised his MP 38 as a Pole staggered from the ruin of a collapsed trench. He fired but not before the Pole got a shot off.

Von Lüttwitz felt a burning sensation on his left arm, looking down, he saw a torn sleeve and blood. He was wounded!


The Polish officer, his name was Bogusław Gulczyński, was standing guard as Elżbieta treated the wounded as best she could. The railway official she had kneed earlier had recovered enough to threaten her with arrest for assault. Lieutenant Gulczyński had dissuaded him from that course of action by threatening to have the railway official arrested for cowardice.

"I'm not in the army, you have no authority here!" the man had blustered.

The lieutenant had simply tapped the holster of his sidearm and said, "This is war, different rules old boy. I suggest you make yourself scarce."

The man had moved off, leaving Elżbieta to finish treating one last woman. As she looked to her patient, she realized that she had died of her wounds while she spoke to the lieutenant.

Elżbieta had sat back with a sigh, the lieutenant patted her shoulder and said, "We should be moving on Miss, this train is going nowhere until the wreckage ahead is cleared and a new locomotive can be found. Where are you headed?"

"Warszawa, my family is there, I was attending university in Kraków, but all classes were cancelled because of the German invasion." she was at a loss for what to do, for some reason she trusted this young man in uniform.

"Ah, perhaps we might travel together. I am going to Warszawa to take up a position on the General Staff."

"How do we get there?" Elżbieta asked.

"Ah, leave that to me, I'm sure I can arrange transport." with that, the lieutenant began to walk towards the nearby town, Elżbieta followed, she could think of no other course of action.


The Sanitäter had cleaned and bandaged von Lüttwitz's wound, which was nothing more than a scratch according to the Sani. Von Lüttwitz wasn't so sure, it certainly hurt worse than any scratch he'd ever had.

"Come on Jürgen, on your feet boy. That's not even enough for a Verwundetenabzeichen²." Unteroffizier Hartmann chuckled as he said that.

Von Lüttwitz was somewhat chagrined by Hartmann's comment, he didn't want to seem weak. He was something of an oddity in the unit to begin with, the 30th Infantry had been raised in Schleswig-Holstein, von Lüttwitz was a Saxon. A number of the other men had wondered how he had wound up in the 30th.

Truth was that he had been in Lübeck when the Anschluß³ had occurred, he had been caught up in the patriotic fervor which had followed and had enlisted immediately. If he had waited to be drafted, he would have been in a Saxon unit, but he hadn't. Some of the other men thought him to be an idiot for volunteering. Most of the other men were draftees.

"Let's get you over to the company tailor and patch your tunic up, we'll be moving out again tomorrow. The Poles are putting up more resistance than the General Staff had planned for. Truth be told, we took far too many casualties breaking through the Poles first line. Now come on!" Hartmann led the way, von Lüttwitz followed sheepishly. He still had a lot to learn about being in the Army.


¹ Private (Schütze)
² Wound Badge, the German equivalent of the U.S. Purple Heart.
³ The Anschluß was the joining of Austria and Germany into one country in 1938.

46 comments:

  1. OT:
    Cruise problems: https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/ports-waterways/589881-passengers-stuck-at-sea-after-norwegian-cancels-cruise

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    1. For some reason, I'm interested. Just sayin

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    2. And technically they're not "stuck" pn board. They're RTB NYC with no stops enroute

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  2. Crusty Old TV Tech here. The Germans certainly listend to Chekhov, the "gun" definitely went off in the third act! This story is getting very interesting Sarge. Bravo.

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  3. Sarge, I have very seldom if ever sought out those that have such stories as my understanding (from reading, anyway) is that Luttwitz's experience is that of many: the actual act of war is a terrible thing and not at all like we imagine it to be.

    Doing a quick read, it seems that the Nazi's in fact specifically targeted the civilian population as part of the action. Am I wrong, or was this different from World War I?

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    1. Getting refugees to clog the transport arteries would slow military movement. I'm not sure if the Wehrmacht targeted civilians as a matter of policy or if individuals in the heat of battle saw everything as a target. The Luftwaffe was not very careful in their selection of targets, that much is clear.

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    2. Well, targeting civilians has kind of been the thing since the Thirty Years War. And before. With some variations.

      Civilized war? Not so much. And plenty of towns and civilian centers were targeted by both sides during the previous war, with the Germans, of course, being more often the scoundrels that did it.

      Shooting up civilians? Clogs roads and rails, ports and crossings and adds their medical care to the already overstreched burden of what medical personnel were there.

      Remember, the Germans learned a lot about their variety of warfare from the Spanish Civil War, where no-one was a 'civilian' and atrocities were the order of the day. In other words, typical communist/socialist warfare.

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    3. Beans, you are right of course about the lessons learned from the Spanish Civil War. I forget that in the time period we are discussing, it was still very much recent history and an example of a "successful" campaign (in quotes as it achieved its objectives, not in the rightness of those objectives).

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    4. The train is a legitimate military target. They may not have known if it was troops or civilians on board.

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    5. Beans - The Luftwaffe was a very politically-correct force. Lots of Nazis in the ranks. Remember Guernica?

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    6. TB - The Condor Legion brought lessons home which the Luftwaffe continued to practice.

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    7. jimc5499 - A legitimate target? Perhaps.

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    8. Arthur Harris is supposed to have said, " You can make a machine tool in three weeks, but it makes twenty five years, to make a machinist ".

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    9. Harris was,in my book, a war criminal.

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  4. Hey Old AFSarge;

    It is like visiting "Old Friends" if you know what I mean. And Yeah the Luftwaffe did target trains, they had no reason to discern civilians and military targets, and damaging a train clogging a track was a viable military objective and if civilians got in the way...well you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

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    1. We also targeted trains, a major form of transport in WWII. Stop the trains, you stop the enemy's logistical effort. Lots of ammo and fuel for the German thrust into the Ardennes in 1944 was on the wrong side of the Rhine. Allied air kept the trains from moving closer.

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    2. The gun camera film of train attacks can be quite impressive. In a horrific sort of way.

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  5. "Some of the other men thought him to be an idiot for volunteering. Most of the other men were draftees."

    Some things never change. I experienced the same mindset when I enlisted in '60. US vs RA. If your serial number began with "US", draftee. RA meant volunteer.

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    1. In Napoléon's army, long service chevrons were known as galons d'idiot, idiot stripes.

      RA, Regular Army, I'll take a volunteer over a draftee any day, they're more motivated.

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  6. Good job on getting the horror and confusion right. Nothing is more confused than a 'planned' call-up while under attack. And it's like HG Wells' "War of the Worlds." The 'Martians' don't care to differentiate between soldiers and civilians. And anything moving is a target. Any civilian aiding a soldier is 'aiding and abetting' whether it's medical care or helping load or digging entrenchments or just getting off the road and out of the way.

    Total War has always existed. We (humans) just stopped (for the most part) taking slaves of the non-combatants (for the most part.) It has always been such. Kill all the males above puberty, kill the old people, enslave all the rest after showing them they've been subjugated. Been the pattern of warfare since humans first started warfare. Sadly.

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    1. "War is cruelty, adn you cannot refine it ..." William T. Sherman.

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    2. Ironically American Civil War was quite civil, by civil war standards (looks at Russia 1917-20, Spain 1936-39 or recently Syria) - POW lot was bad, and Sherman did a lot of burned ground, but almost no one had done "round up some civilians and shoot them"...

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    3. Good point, not applicable in all areas though. Guerilla warfare in Missouri and Kansas saw a lot of civilian deaths.

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    4. Don't forget Sherman's March. Make Them Howl!

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    5. They weren't killing civilians.

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  7. Offtopic, but urgent: apparently Russia is moving Iskander-M units from Far East to European part

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  8. Much of German attitude towards cuvilian casualties has depended on the service branch. It was joked tht Germany had imperial Navy, republic army and nazi air force. As air force was basically created after nazi takeover, they had been most indoctrinated.

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    1. Thank Pawel! I had not heard that phrase before, but I can easily see where it came from - and it does make sense.

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    2. TB - Remember Hermann Göring was the head of the Luftwaffe, Nazis didn't get much bigger than him. (Both figuratively and literally.)

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    3. Of note: in 1939 there were quite a few official complaints by Wehrmacht officers about SS units prowling in their wake and shooting notable Poles like teachers, priests or lawyers, and of course Jews if they had occassion. Obviously the complaints did not achieve anything since they hit upper Nazi echelons, but there were people still having courage to protest.
      As late as 1942 Doenitz had to issue specific order to his u-boot commanders forbidding taking risks to save survivors of their attacks, which says something about the state of affairs in the Navy.
      Luftwaffe started the war with things like bombardment of Wielun, off the bat.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wielu%C5%84

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    4. The Einsatzgruppen were active behind the lines from the beginning in the East.

      Nasty bastards.

      Wielun was an atrocity, one of many committed by the Nazis.

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    5. Hitler once commented that he had a Christian Navy, a reactionary Army, and a National Socialist Air Force.

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  9. Might want to work on this line a bit more:
    "The man had moved off, leaving Elżbieta to finished treating one last woman, who had died of her wounds while being treated."

    Concur with Mr.G. Trains and the transportation system were the targets, passengers were unintended collateral damage, unless of course the flyboys knew there were troops or military supplies on board in which case, they may have been the primary reason for attack. Fog of war and all that.
    John Blackshoe

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    1. Oh dear Lord that's an ugly, ugly sentence. Fixed it.

      Trains were used extensively to move men and material. Just like our own Civil War.

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  10. I hope I can follow "Liddy" (Jürgen Lüttwitz) for a few more chapters.

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    1. Well, we know he survived the war. Hang in there boron, I'm writing as fast as I can.

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    2. he got first of his wounds but there will be many more coming...

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  11. I've seen the same confusions, incomprehension, wholly inappropriate orders, ... pure insanity at bad auto accidents.

    Saw a cop, insisting he was arresting the drunken driver, put into his own cuffs and locked in a backseat. He had repeatedly tried to arrest a passenger who was in labor and was the victim of a hit and run. It's worse out there than I can imagine.

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    1. A lot of people aren't very clear headed in times of crisis. I've seen that myself.

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