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| (Source) |
Tryb shot his sergeant a look, "I'd think those Tigers could handle this mud, all that power, wide tracks ..."
"Nah, even a tank will sink into this morass if the driver's not careful."
He noticed that the SS men were busy unloading the stuck LKW. Which appeared to him as if it were a torpedoed ship, slowly capsizing. No doubt they intended to lighten the load so they could get it up on more solid ground.
Off the road, where his company was marching, wasn't much more solid than the road. But it hadn't been cut up by vehicles. Once they started running vehicles beside the road, you wouldn't see the difference.
Krausse remembered the fall of 1941, the men had expected to be in Moscow before the snow fell. No doubt the French had thought the same in 1812, his lieutenant had said. Some of the younger troops had scoffed at that.
"What, the French? How could they get to Moscow, they couldn't even stop us in just a month. They're not fighters!" Gefreiter Georg Hartmann had said that, Krausse couldn't even remember the man's face, he'd been killed outside Moscow when the Siberians had come out of the night and snow.
The lieutenant had told the man, "Don't mistake poor politicians and bad officers for bad soldiers. F**kers knew how to fight under Napoléon. In the last war they killed my grandfather at the Somme. They know how to fight. 1940 was an outlier, never forget that."
Some of the men had survived the winter of '41, many had not. Krausse shivered and thought again of the "Frozen Meat Medal," the Ostmedaille, which those who had been in Russia from November of '41 to April of '42 were awarded. Of all the men of his company, only twenty-seven survived to actually wear that ribbon in the second button hole of their tunics.
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| Medaille Winterschlacht im Osten 1941/42 (Source) |
Their original commander had been killed in action in October of '41. His old platoon commander, Leutnant Herbert Krupinski, had then taken command. He'd been badly wounded in December, in the same attack which had killed Hartmann and many others.
Another lieutenant, Krausse couldn't remember his name, he'd been killed in action the same day he reported for duty, had taken command. After that, Krausse had the company, "temporarily" the battalion commander, Major Walter Kruger, had said.
Kruger had died that spring, now the battalion was commanded by a lieutenant, most of the companies by sergeants, there was one platoon commanded by a senior private. It seemed to Krausse that the Wehrmacht was slowly bleeding to death on the Russian steppes.
"You there! Feldwebel! Where is your officer?"
Krausse looked up into the face of a rather agitated SS-man, an SS-Unterscharführer. A damned junior sergeant!
"It's Stabsfeldwebel² to you, Kleiner³. My officer is in a grave near Kharkov. Want to go see him?" Krausse had fingered the trigger of his MP 40 which left the SS-man in no doubt that Krausse would use it. If he had to.
The man bristled momentarily, then said, "Sorry, long f**king day. But could you lot help us get our LKW out of the muck? The Tiger platoon commander doesn't want to leave the road, he feels like the road is his best bet."
Krausse sighed, he didn't want to help these SS bastards, he had seen their handiwork outside Kyiv last September. But it would set a bad example to the men, if these guys had been army, he would help, so ...
"Tryb, let's help these fellows move that LKW, those Tigers need to be up front, not back here in the rear!"
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| (Source)⁴ |
"Arrogant bastards." Tryb had said, spitting into the mud in their direction.
"Yes, and what they've done in this war, we'll all pay for some day. Mark my words, Manfred."
Tryb shook his head, "I know."
¹ Sometimes translated as "thaw." Colloquially it means the "season of bad roads." Rasputitsa: "распу́тица" in Russian.
² A Stabsfeldwebel is the equivalent of a Sergeant Major, an SS-Unterscharführer is a very junior sergeant, one step above a corporal.
³ Kiddo.
⁴ Yes, I know it's a different truck type than in the first photo.
Now that's mud....uf da! No love lost for the SS.
ReplyDeleteSerious mud!
DeleteThat would just suck...
DeleteHeh, literally.
DeleteIn one of the World War series by Turtledove, one of the Lizard landcruiser drivers, when contemplating the Russian Mud, curses it as a continent long, a continent wide, and probably a continent deep.
ReplyDeleteAre we seeing some foreshadowing (an important literary device) in the last couple of lines?
As to the foreshadowing, I seldom know where my Muse is going, I'm just along for the ride.
DeleteSarge, that picture is really revealing. The look on the gentleman's face on the right has the combination of a resigned look of despair and the knowledge it is not getting any better.
ReplyDelete"We can do it better than those people who tried to do it last time. They were so much more...primitive and old-fashioned" - Lots of people, all human history.
Imagine what people a century from now will think of us. I daresay it won't be complimentary.
DeleteSarge, much like the period and time you are writing about (National Socialism and Communism), I dare say people in 100 years will look at what we have become, shake their heads at the poor, benighted fools that believed it, and wonder "How could they have been so stupid not to see the outcomes of their beliefs?"
DeleteBingo.
DeleteCrusty Old TV Tech here. Before tarmac and concrete road surfacing became commonplace in the mid 20th century (here in the US at least), most everywhere was subject to "Rasputitsa" season during the year. Imagine the improvement in transport efficiency from that one simple thing, paved roads. The Romans knew. They paved roads 2000 years ago for that reason. And, every army everywhere that fought in mud season knew, too. There is really no vehicle that can pass over a mud road with any sort of payload, it's just too hard to spread the load out over enough mud surface while digging in enough for traction. Tracked vehicles, yeah, but how much flour can a tank carry?
ReplyDeleteThere are still roads in my home state that are impassable in the spring due to the mud.
DeleteThe Romans were ahead of their time.
Sarge, the more I have read on Greek and Roman history, the more impressive it becomes - not only for the expanse and scope of their work, but the fact that they did it with what we would consider primitive tools - yet surely things like the Antikythera device cannot have been a one off, and we have Roman and Greek ruins standing after 1800 years where in other places structures did not make it for 200 years - yet they are the primitive, uncivilized ones.
DeleteOnly a coddled idiot would believe that the Romans and Greeks were primitive and uncivilized.
DeleteThere's a lot of that going around.
Children, playing with Legos trying to build a pyramid, understanding neither the engineering or effort that went into the pyramid nor the labor to construct nor even the technology to make the plastic blocks they are attempting to build with, yet declaiming that theirs is far superior.
DeleteNot everyone, of course, but a lot of people.
And many of them vote ...
DeleteAfter the US invasion of Attu in WW2, the Seabees were tasked with building an airfield. The only two vehicles able to move in the bottomless muskeg mud were two tracked draglines. Each had two large platforms of timber cribbing. They would sit on one, reach behind with the boom, pick the other one up and set it in front. Then repeat. In position, one was digging gravel from a hill at maximum boom extension, then dropping it just in reach of the other dragline (also at maximum boom extension) to pick up and dump on where the airfield was going to be.
DeleteInteresting, no other way to do it I would suspect.
DeleteSeabees can often accomplish the "impossible"
DeleteBG
That they can.
DeleteLooks like a Fern Township (Hubbard county, Minnesota) road before the frost goes out.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest after that first year where the school bus could not make it to the place for all those weeks they fixed the road (trees removed to give it sun, ditches on both sides and graded/graveled to get the shape right).
Well, it doesn't surprise me that that part of the country would have that sort of weather. I mean, that's way up there. Not quite Canada, but close.
DeleteThe lieutenant had told the man, "Don't mistake poor politicians and bad officers for bad soldiers. F**kers knew how to fight under Napoléon. In the last war they killed my grandfather at the Somme. They know how to fight. 1940 was an outlier, never forget that."
ReplyDeleteYeah the Average Frenchman knew how to fight, but the rot had infected their senior officers and politicians, they were defeated before the Germans struck the first blow. only De Gaulle wanted to fight "La Boche" but he also fought his chain of command too because he had a sizable ego like a lot of senior French Officers did.
De Gaulle, sizable ego? Understatement of the year, that is.
DeleteMrG,
Delete"but the rot had infected their senior officers and politicians"
Sounds distressingly familiar doesn't it?
juvat
All too familiar.
DeleteWhile I supposed that the average soldier in the Heer was resentful of the SS (which probably got the best of everything), I wonder how aware they were of the utter evil that the SS represented.
ReplyDeleteSome may have known, many may have suspected, but there is a lot of evidence that Army units also participated in the Holocaust.
DeleteThere's an interesting documentary on Netflix right now, Ordinary Men. It's about a police unit recruited for the Eastern Front from older men not eligible for Army service at that time. It shows how even the most ordinary of people can commit heinous crimes.
The "banality of evil" I've heard it termed. Hannah Arendt wrote a book about it, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Read the book some years ago; didn't know there was a documentary (don't/won't do flix).
DeleteWe have such people now; the two murders on 6 Jan 21 attest to that.
BG
Let's not go there. We've always had that sort, all nations do. My Lai springs to mind.
Delete