RAIDING PARTY, 52nd Infantry Division 9.41 on the Briansk Front, Soldiers of Barbarossa Nr. 7

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Episode 173

In part seven in the series covering diary entries and letters from this wonderful book, well go through a letter written by a
soldier who served with the German 52nd infantry division from the front near Briansk in late September of 1941.

In your letter from the 23.8. you ask whether we carry guns. But, Bobi, what do you think? What do you really think? Do you think we’re throwing stones out here? Of course every soldier has his gun, and even a pistol as well. Don’t worry. . .

And now I’ll tell you a bit about our work. You wanted to know what we do. This was the day before yesterday. We had the task of storming the village occupied by the enemy, taking prisoners, and getting back unharmed if at all possible. So it all kicked off at 2:30 a.m. I took another two men from the section with me, because during the attack we were always laying a telephone line so that we could stay connected with the front behind us. A railway line goes through the middle of the village. The same one runs from our section to the Russian front. So 40 men advance on the left, and 40 men on the right of the railway line. At 4:20 a.m. our artillery begins hammering. At 5:00 a.m. the last shell falls. Now the path is clear for us. During the darkness, we have come, unnoticed, to within 200 meters of the first buildings with our telephone then our machine guns and our mortars begin barking. The enemy infantry race for cover into the first buildings. The shooting intensifies, there’s whistling and shooting all round our heads. The Russians are firing wildly about the place. They were very rudely awakened from their sleep and don’t know where they should run to and even less where they should be shooting.

At this stage in the campaign the 52. ID was part of the 12 AK in the 4th Army which was positioned on the Briansk front. The division was being led by General Lothar Rendulic. He went on to command the 35th Army Corps in 1943 at Kursk and then in 1944 lead anti partisan forces in Yugoslavia against Tito. As we can see, in late September the Briansk Front was being held by infantry formations with the 10th Pz, part of PzG 4 held back in reserve.

You see, a surprise attack, has a particular strength. You should have seen their stupid faces. A surprise like that must be dreadful. That’s nothing new for us; we don’t notice it any more. But their fear, their stubborn ignorance [sture Verbohrtheit], that we’re going to shoot them, it just makes us shake our heads. Well, that’s Soviet propaganda. The poor people get told, if you are captured, then the Germans will shoot you. You see, my little Bobel, at 7:00 a.m. we had finished our work. There was death there, too. We quickly set about our withdrawal so that we wouldn’t immediately attract the attention of the Russian artillery. Just on the short way back that the three of us took, we counted 90 dead Russians. All together the Russians lost 150 prisoners and just as many dead on this raiding party. An antitank gun was also destroyed. On our side there were one fatality and seven casualties. The enemy had placed their mortars rounds dangerously close but nothing else they did was significant. On our way back the three of us now had to roll up the telephone line unnoticed. At 8:00 a.m. we were back sitting in our bunker and really enjoying the hot ground coffee.