In August of 1942 I got my transfer orders, to the Airfleet 1 in Riga, Latvia. Going to the “Worker’s Paradise” didn’t sound very interesting, but what could I do? I found that almost my entire company was to be shipped to the eastern theater. The only exception was the Ph.D. aspirant, who was promoted right away and send to the Africa Corps, because he was a specialist on Egyptian economy. At the company go-away dinner he already appeared in his new uniform and ensign rank, and the sergeants who trained him had to salute him now. I managed to get a few minutes of English conversation in with him. He wasn’t happy with his assignment, because he didn’t believe that Rommel could make it to the Suez Canal.

The next day we boarded a regular passenger train to Allenstein, Eastern Prussia, where we transferred to a freight train equipped to run on the wider Russian rail tracks. We were issued food and additional ammunition for our carbines and told to be alert at all times. These transports had been attacked by Russian partisans (guerillas), who blasted part of the rails to stop the train, and than attacked it from camouflaged positions along the tracks.

The weather was summery warm. We were still not accustomed to the fact that we were soldiers going to war. I was enjoying the beautiful countryside where the harvest was in full swing.

After two days the train reached Riga, the capital of Latvia. My friend Kurt König (King) and I and several others, were assigned to the Luftwaffen Liaison Company 3/31 in Siverskaja (Russian spelling Ssiverskij) about 40 miles south of Leningrad (now again St. Petersburg). We were told that we would not be leaving until the next day, because there was quite a backlog on space in the trains.

Since we had time to kill, we left our rucksacks at the Riga military train station, and walked through the beautiful and historic old city, founded in 1201 by the Teutonic Knights. Riga is a major seaport of the Baltic Sea and had been a member of the Hanseatic League. The city had been occupied in July 1941 by the German Army Group North on their way to Leningrad. Except for the large number of military people present, the city looked normal, with hardly any destruction or damage.

In the late afternoon we walked back to the station to check the train schedules. While I was in one of the restrooms a woman came in to clean. She was wearing the yellow star of David, which all Jews had to wear. It was the first time I had seen anybody with the yellow star in the military operations area. I started a carefully concealed conversation with her, because according to the official rules, we were not allowed to speak to each other. She spoke German and also English. She was from Riga, and had been forced to work for the German military. It was difficult to carry on a conversation since there were other soldiers in the restroom. I managed to tell her that not all people in Germany were for Hitler, or condoned what he did to the Jewish people. I tried to encourage her to go underground, because I figured that would be easier up there in Latvia, but she said that wasn’t possible. She then had to leave quickly, military police called Kettenhunde (chain-dogs) because they wore an engraved metal plate hanging from a chain above their chest, appeared to check soldiers for transport papers. They told me to get my ass up to platform two on the double, since the train was coming through in about 10 minutes.

King, I, and the other assigned soldiers continued our trip on a passenger train full of soldiers returning from furlough in Germany. The mood of some of the returning soldiers was somber, because they had found their homes destroyed and some had lost family members in air raids. The trip took us from Riga via Pleskau (Pskov) and Luga to Siverskaja. From the station we walked to the company headquarters, which looked like an old Russian resort camp. The staff sergeant we reported to at our arrival was a rude and unpleasant character. I guessed that he was an alcoholic. He showed us were we would be quartered, where the mess hall was, and told us that at 14:30 hour he wanted to see us all in front of the administration building, where the company chief would address us.

Into Liaison

The Company’s commander was Captain Herrgot, a dashing and a little too elegant man in his forties, who looked more like the CEO of a large company than a military man. He welcomed us and briefed us on the basic function of his unit. We would be the communications link between the Luftwaffe (Air Force) and the Army. Unlike the US Army, the German army did not have their own air force. Communication groups of his company provided the liaison between the forward army commands with “Airfleet 1” in Riga. At times we would serve as forward air controllers when tactical aircraft attacked enemy positions, and we had to direct or correct the targeting. The company had two armored personnel carriers with special wireless equipment, and numerous other communication vans. Captain Herrgot told the staff sergeant his highest priority was to have us new men trained on the equipment and have us ready for action within two weeks.

From the company’s headquarters, communication groups of one officer and six to eight men with a communications van were dispatched to army command posts. The officer was officially called “Flivo” (Flieger Verbindungs Officer), an acronym meaning Air Force Liaison Officer. Our communication groups could be stationed from 1/2 mile behind the front lines at Division headquarters, to 15 miles back at Army Corps headquarters. The liaison group’s prime task was to inform the tactical air force units where our front lines were, and to inform the army what air force units were available for supportive action. Another task was to interpret aerial reconnaissance photographs for the Army’s tactical and information officers. At times we also performed weather observation functions for the flying units.

The communication vans were two-axle 5 ton Opel or Mercedes trucks, with dual rear tires, not an appropriate vehicle for the road conditions in Russia. Enemy action had destroyed all but two of the much better suited three axle, all-wheel drive vans, which had been standard in prewar years. Due to the high replacement cost and the scarcity of material, no replacements were available.

In the next two weeks we were trained to operate the equipment that was in the vans. On top of the truck bed was a camper shell which looked very much like today’s campers. Attached to each vehicle was a 45 feet high (when fully extended) telescoping mast for antennas. A gasoline powered 220 volt AC generator was in a pullout compartment.

The radio equipment was of two kinds. The older so called Fu.G.3 (Funk Gerät 3) and the much newer Fu.G.10. Both were aircraft receiver/transmitter type units. The older Fu.G.3 was big and had been designed for aircraft like the Junkers 52 transport, or the Junkers 86, while the much smaller Fu.G.10 was used in the Junkers 88, Heinkel 111, Focke Wulf 189 and many other aircraft. Since both were designed for aircraft, they ran on direct current (DC) from the aircraft’s batteries. In the vans there was a big rectifier unit that converted the A/C output of the generator to the DC requirement of the receiver/transmitter.

Since I was always interested in the technical end of the electronic equipment, I soon made the acquaintance of sergeant Baumgarten, who was in charge of the technical support group. Sergeant Baumgarten was a genuine Berliner, and had owned a radio store there. He was a quiet and pleasant fellow, and we soon had a personal relationship of mutual trust, which we established through carefully worded conversations. It turned out that we both didn’t believe in the Nazi bullshit. Baumgarten had a rather distinctly looking Semitic nose, to put it mildly. When we were alone, I kiddingly asked him one day, if he had been able to provide an “Aryan certificate” for his nose. Baumgarten laughed and said, “Don’t you know what your chief commander has said?” And of course I knew. Göring had stated publicly at one time, “I determine who is a Jew.” No more had to be said about the subject, because we trusted each other, and I never tried to find out how Baumgarten managed to end up in the Luftwaffe.

Each liaison group also had a personnel carrier, like the military version of the Volkswagen, or a Kfz.15, similar to the American GI vehicle. After intensive training on all these pieces of equipment, I left with a group on September 10, 1942 for the 170th Infantry Division in Michalowka.

Into the mud around “Lenin’s Grad”

Michalowka was located about 18 miles east of Leningrad and about ten miles south of Lake Ladoga. I was in the area that was part of the German military encirclement of Leningrad. The encirclement started in the west, with the German navy blockading Leningrad from the Gulf of Finland, denying Russian ships access to the Baltic Sea. The Gulf was heavily mined and closed off by a huge underwater steel net to keep Russian submarines out of the Baltic Sea.

To the south and east the German army had dug in around Leningrad. To the north Finnish troops had cut off the city. The only opening in the siege of Leningrad was across Lake Ladoga which at times allowed them to connect with the rest of Russia.

Lake Ladoga is the largest lake in the European part of the USSR. It has a surface area of about 6,800 square miles (about 90% of Lake Ontario) and a maximum depth of 750 feet. It is fed by many rivers, has more than 600 islands, and drains via the Neva River into the Gulf of Finland. The river flows through Leningrad, and splits into several arms giving parts of the city the appearance of Venice. Leningrad is surrounded by flat land, and parts are densely forested with birch trees and other trees that are well suited for wetland areas. Many areas to the east, particularly along the Volkhov River, are enormous swamps during every spring thaw. The land is thinly populated and there are few major roads. To make these areas accessible, the German Army Corps of Engineers, with the help of Russian POWs and civilians, had built hundreds of miles of corduroy roads. Corduroy roads were made by transversely laying millions of tree trunks on the ground, and tying them with heavy wire or steel cables. These roads were strong enough to be used by supply trucks, artillery and tanks.

We were dispatched to a very large peat bog area south of Lake Ladoga. In peacetime, the peat was used in the largest peat fired electric generating plant in the world. The peat had been harvested by work camps called poseloks, probably manned by political prisoners, and was loaded on cars of narrow gauge rail lines, which converged towards the now heavily damaged power plant located right at the Neva River. The plant had supplied approximately one third of the electricity for the city of Leningrad. The front line was going right through that plant.

The German army, when it occupied Michalowka and Mga, had sealed off the city’s last rail lines to the east, and hence the rest of Russia. The Russian army had made an attempt to lift this siege of Leningrad by attacking from the Volkhov front in the east, to break through the bottleneck south of Lake Ladoga. The initial Russian penetration through the German lines had been sealed off, and we were now counterattacking to eliminate this Russian salient.

My group drove into Michalowka over muddy roads and moved into an earthen bunker. Because of the high groundwater level (2-3 feet below the surface) the bunker had only been dug 12 inches below the ground, and railroad ties filled with mud formed the bunker walls above the ground. The ceiling of the bunker was also made of old railroad ties with soil on top for protection. We were located in the middle of German artillery positions, which fired at the encircled Russian forces north of us. Supposedly 100,000 Russians were trapped in the swampy area south of Lake Ladoga. It was a horrible terrain to fight a war in. The groundwater level was too high to dig any real foxholes, and in the air were trillions of mosquitoes. Many soldiers on both sides came down with mosquito born diseases, such as the deadly spotted fever.

Where iron flies

Since the communications bunker was only 2,000 yards behind the front lines, we were frequently subjected to Russian artillery shelling. The Russians aimed to eradicate the German artillery, located all around our bunker. Because of the frequent shelling, our communication group moved the radio receiver into the bunker, and parked the van with the transmitter about 100 feet away. The transmitter was remotely operated from the relative safety of the bunker. I had to go outside from time to time to refuel the generator, or change transmitter frequencies. As the new man in this group, I got the shitty jobs that the old-timers didn’t like to do, but I didn’t mind. This job was a thousand times better than that of an infantry man sitting in a wet fox hole, fighting the deadly battles of a senseless war. However when artillery shells came down near our bunker we too had to hustle to survive the hot iron flying around.

Survival is the prime objective

In a war I learned survival, and I quickly learned to distinguish between the sounds of incoming artillery shells that would land nearby, the ones that would land close by, or the ones that are too damn close. In the latter case one usually didn’t need the information any more, because one was a basket case. As radio operators, we all had exceedingly well trained ears that helped us sort out incoming artillery rounds. But our hearing ability was constantly damaged by the incessant percussion of exploding shells, and the firings of our own artillery. Conducting critical radio communications by Morse code under these conditions was tough.

During the firing of salvos from the German artillery I observed a strange phenomenon in our transmitter. When the nearby 8,8 cm Flak guns fired, the transmitter went silent for a split second. We could never find out why this happened, but I guessed that the 8,8’s high muzzle shock wave was vibrating the grids in the vacuum tubes in the transmitter. It was frustrating, because we lost parts of our transmission, and had to repeat some text groups. We didn’t like to be on the air any longer than absolutely necessary because we didn’t want the Russians to locate our transmitter and aim their artillery at us.

Our bunker was next to the railroad tracks that ran east from Leningrad via Mga to Tishvin. On the other side of the tracks were remnants of trees that had been mutilated by exploding shells. We used several of the tree trunks to construct an open air latrine, referred to as the “Donnerbalken” or thunderbeam, an appropriate name.

First Russian attempt to break the siege of Leningrad Aug./Sept. 1942, which was repulsed.

One day I was sitting there fanning my rear end with reading material to keep the mosquitoes away, when “Ivan” decided to disturb my meditation with rounds of his 3" guns. They were apparently aiming at the railroad tracks. I estimated the impact points by the sounds of the incoming artillery rounds. As they came closer I figured they would soon to be in the category of “too damn close.”

Despite unfinished business I beat a hasty retreat across the rails towards the bunker, holding onto my pants. As I reached the wet and slippery top step leading down into the bunker, a round exploded about 50 feet behind me on the other side of the tracks. The pressure from the explosion threw me down the steps, and I crashed right through the door into the bunker. I was still desperately holding my pants with one hand, while trying to cushion my fall with the other. I cursed like hell, while blood ran down my chin. “One cannot even shit in peace in this goddamn war,” I said. Everybody burst out laughing except the radio operator on duty. He frantically motioned to quiet down, because he was right in the middle of receiving a message, and had lost part of it because of the racket.

Apparently I had opened the bunker door with my mouth. I tried to stop my bleeding and found that my teeth had cut into the upper lip during the fall. From there on I was blessed with what the British call “a stiff upper lip,” if you will pardon the quip. After I had buttoned my pants and regained my composure, I was the target of another barrage. But it was all good natured. They congratulated me for having run the 100 meter dash in world record time, but my buddies remarked that freestyle, with loose pants, was against the rule. After the shelling subsided, I tried to returned to the location across the tracks to finish my “business”, however the “Donnerbalken” had been smashed to splinters. It had indeed been a too damn close one.

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SBN 1-89-634-05-0, Printed in U.S.A.  Copyright 1999 by Hugelwilhelm Publishing Co.  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages.