The Calm Before the Storm

Bundesarchiv

Hauptmann Johannes Boden of Kampfgruppe 54 was of two minds. On one hand, he was no longer flying missions over England, watching his squadron mates getting shot out of the sky by the Royal Air Force, then on the other hand, here he was in his Ju-88, 6,000 meters above the Soviet Union. As he looked out he shuddered, they were a good thirty kilometers inside the USSR. That patch of haze off to his right had to be Brest-Litovsk.

He looked around the crew compartment, Oberfeldwebel Max Jürgens and Gefreiter Alois Holweck were at their guns, constantly scanning the sky. Though the Ops Officer had told them, again and again, that the Soviets were not reacting at all to overflights of their territory, he was still nervous.

The only man in the crew who seemed to take it all in stride was Feldwebel Leo Habicht. He kept studying his maps, matching what he saw there to the terrain below, and genuinely seeming to be enjoying himself. Occasionally he'd call a course change to his pilot, then return to his navigating. Boden had to admit, the man knew his business.

His new bombardier, on the other hand, was a very nervous individual. Jürgens had come to them via a Heinkel unit. After a period in a Luftwaffe "rest home." The man's nerves had been shattered when his aircraft had gone down in the Channel in late November. He had survived, none of the rest of his crew had. On top of that, it had been the second time he had been shot down.

Boden thought, "I suppose if I had been the sole survivor of my crew, I too would be a little jumpy." He still missed his old bombardier, Philip Scholl. Though the doctors had tried valiantly to save Scholl's eyesight, he had lost the sight in both of his eyes. Scholl claimed that he could see light and blurry shapes in his "good" eye. His left eye was completely blind.

"Ah, look at it this way, Johannes, I no longer have to fly over England and I have a nice pension. Things could be worse." Boden remembered Scholl saying when he'd stopped to visit him in Stuttgart on his way to Poland. Boden couldn't imagine how things could be worse. He lived to fly, take that away and they might as well kill him.

"Chef?" Boden heard over the intercom.

"Sorry, daydreaming, what is it Leo?"

"We have all the pictures we need, let's head home."

With a silent prayer of thanksgiving for another uneventful flight over Russia, Boden banked the aircraft and set a course for home.

Unteroffizier Willi Hoffmeister put his pen down and began to fold the letter to his mother. As he placed it in an envelope, leaving the envelope unsealed so that the unit censor could peruse it before it went into the post, he shook his head and sighed again.

Willi was still pissed off, he and his crew had reported to Munster, the Panzerschule to make the transition from the PzKw 38(t) to the new PzKw III H, which had a crew of five as opposed to the four men who manned the older Czech tank. He had expected to receive a new crewman. Weber would keep his job as driver, Krebs would move to gunner, freeing Willi to concentrate on commanding the tank, and Neuhäuser would move up to loader, the new guy would take over as the bow gunner/radio operator.

But on the very first day of training, the four crewmen were introduced to their new tank commander, Leutnant Hermann von Steinbrecher. Willi would no longer be commanding his own vehicle, now he would be, as Horst put it, just a gunner, down in the turret with the rest of the crew.

One of the staff at the Panzerschule, a good friend of Willi's he had known since the Polish campaign, Oberfeldwebel Otto Krämer, had come to see him.

"Willi, don't sweat it. We have lots of new officers who need jobs. Look on the bright side, your Panzer is now the platoon commander's Panzer. We need men like you to keep these kids alive so that they can learn their jobs and eventually command companies, battalions, and up." Otto had explained.

"Jesus Otto, I've commanded my own vehicle since the 1st of September in '39 when we rolled into Poland. We fought in France as well, now I'm relegated to just being a gunner."

"Someone's got to train the kids, once the Leutnant has shown he knows what he's doing, I'll let your company commander know that you want your own Panzer, deal?"

"You sure do know how to sweet talk a person, don't you Otto."

"Well, my father was a politician ..."

As the winter of 1940-1941 grinds on, the pieces are moving into place to launch the largest land campaign of the war. The Germans did routinely fly over Soviet territory on reconnaissance flights, many Soviet commanders were aghast and wanted to shoot them down, Stalin said, "No."

He had his reasons, he knew that the USSR was in no state for a fight with Hitler's Germany, he needed time to get the Red Army into shape. He had purged his military of the men he didn't trust, he needed time to let the new men, his men, learn their jobs.

Accusing the Germans of bad faith or, perish the thought, actually taking action against these overflights might provoke the Germans into attacking. The Soviets just weren't ready yet.

Time would tell.

Author's Note: As you can see, I found a way around the "I can't remember all the players" impasse I mentioned yesterday. I even offered the Muse a couple of days off and she actually refused. "What? And leave you by yourself at the keyboard? Nope, not gonna happen. I can't imagine what sort of drivel you'd write without me by your side." So, here we are, the story continues.