\u201cStalin\u2019s organ\u201d was one of the Russian weapons we also became acquainted with in \u201cMyggedalen.\u201d It was one of the most frightening, though more nerve-racking than actually dangerous, and therefore we came to respect it more than it perhaps deserved.
One dark night, Peder and I were on guard; everything was calm and quiet. We stood talking quietly together. Suddenly, behind the enemy lines, a huge sea of flames appeared, followed by an enormous rushing sound like a storm moving toward us.
We stood as if nailed to the ground and perceived nothing other than astonishment. A few seconds after the storm-like wind hit us, the shells landed around us in a scale we had never seen before, and out of sheer surprise we did not manage to take cover in time.
Nothing happened to us, and a few seconds after we had seen the flash, complete silence returned again, with the only change being that there were now between 18 and 32 new shell craters around us.
It is a considerable barrage to receive all at once, but since shell fragments only have lethal effect in the immediate vicinity of the impact point, it is mainly the nerves that are affected.
It is a terrifying sensation to hear this immense rushing sound in the air and not know where the large number of shells will fall, because there are so many at once.
All other artillery weapons fire only one shell at a time, and one can accurately judge where it will land, even if they come in very rapid succession. But the \u201cStalin organ\u201d has as many barrels as the number of shells it fires at once, and it launches the whole salvo in a single burst, which makes it impossible to judge where they will fall.
The Russians were probably aware that it was most psychologically disturbing, because they did not use it much in actual combat. Instead, we would sometimes receive a couple of salvos a day for a period, almost at fixed times, and it was extremely irritating to keep waiting for it. <\/p>\n
My platoon leader, the German Kling, came to be highly appreciated by us during those days out there. He was always with us and could appear in the most impossible places, always completely alone and perfectly calm; even in the fiercest fighting he moved around as if he were at home in his own garden.
We all agreed that he must have had no nerves at all. He was a very skilled leader and a good and helpful comrade. Just as much as we had disliked him for his almost inhuman strictness during training in the barracks, just as much we now cared for him as a friend out there in the danger.
We now had many opportunities to be grateful for what he had taught us during training, as it proved useful to us during the fighting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2273,"template":"","personer":[104],"class_list":["post-2381","litteratur_og_kilder","type-litteratur_og_kilder","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","personer-aage-mariegaard"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/litteratur_og_kilder\/2381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/litteratur_og_kilder"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/litteratur_og_kilder"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"personer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/personer?post=2381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}