The Forest Is Combed Through
The next morning we awoke to one of the hardest days I experienced in Russia (and there was certainly no shortage of such days).
After eating breakfast, we moved out into the wild forests toward areas known only to the commanders through their orders from the German command of the sector.
We marched company by company in single file, with a few paces between each man.
This open formation was always used near the front lines, because an enemy shell or bomb would then only be able to hit a very small part of the unit.
We soon made the acquaintance of the howling shells in the air and threw ourselves flat on the ground, just as we had been taught in barracks.
But it turned out to be unnecessary, since they were our own guns firing over us at the Russians.
However, it required a long period of practice to be able to tell from the sound whether such a shell would land dangerously close.
Later on, we could stand completely calm with shells screaming through the air overhead and determine with great accuracy, simply from the sound, where they would land. <\/p>\n
It now turned out that our task was to comb through certain forest areas in search of scattered enemy units.
This is very exhausting and dangerous work, because in the dense, wild forests one can walk straight into the jaws of a concealed enemy without discovering him until it is too late.
In a long line, we advanced throughout the entire morning through the most impassable wilderness of forest and swamp, carrying our heavy equipment.
Several times a man sank up to his stomach and was on the verge of giving up from sheer exhaustion.
Around midday, we returned to the place where we had slept during the night, completely soaked and worn out.
My company had not seen anything of the enemy. <\/p>\n
After we had eaten our midday meal, the order came to move out again, and after that we did not return until nearly a month later.
We were to occupy some positions in the H.K.L. that the Russians had driven the Germans out of.
A short distance behind the H.K.L., my group (11 men) was sent ahead as an observation patrol, with the deputy platoon leader, Usha Oberhuber, in command.
It became a journey that lasted the entire afternoon until 1900 hours in the evening, and one that I have never forgotten.
After wandering about for two or three hours, we halted, and the group leader tried to get his bearings. He now openly admitted that he had no idea where we were. <\/p>\n
We naturally became rather uneasy, for getting lost in these forests was no trifling matter.
Things did not improve when we discovered that we had ended up behind the Russian lines.
We made this discovery when, from our hiding place, we saw some Russians peacefully moving about a short distance away, working with a field kitchen.
Every one of us was now ready for combat at a second’s notice.
With the utmost caution, we crept into some dense, concealing undergrowth.
The task now was to find a fixed point in the terrain so that we could orient ourselves on the map, but that was no easy matter in these forests, which had neither roads nor any other permanent landmarks.
We soon realized that we could not determine where we were from the place in which we now found ourselves. <\/p>\n
With the utmost caution and with our fingers on the trigger (I was armed with a machine gun and carried about 1,500 rounds of ammunition for it), we set off under the cover of the trees in the direction that we believed would lead us back to our own lines.
In this manner we continued until about evening, and only through the greatest caution and patience did we avoid coming into contact with \u201cIvan.\u201d
A battle that would certainly have cost all of us our lives.
I shall never forget how we crept forward to a small rise covered with low bushes, in which we concealed ourselves.
In front of us lay a large open area, and we could see a narrow forest road running along the edge of the woods on the opposite side of the clearing.
By looking carefully through our binoculars, we could see that the road had been used recently.
Suddenly, a column of Russians emerged from the forest edge, marching in groups of four men.
Each group carried a stretcher with a wounded soldier upon it.
Almost simultaneously, all of us observing the procession through our binoculars were startled, for we suddenly saw German sentries alongside the column and realized that these were Russian prisoners carrying our wounded comrades to the dressing station.
This procession could walk unhindered in front of the enemy’s rifle barrels because most of them were Russian prisoners. <\/p>\n
We could now establish that we had ended up either directly within the Russian lines or in no man’s land, and both were decidedly unpleasant facts.
To reach our own lines, we would now have to pass in front of both German and Russian weapons.
The Germans might easily mistake us for Russians wearing German uniforms, as such things happened frequently.
We scarcely dared take the long detour around the clearing, because in that case we could easily run into enemy units.
Good advice was now hard to come by.
But patience is the soldier\u2019s virtue, and this time we learned that well.
We lay perfectly still for a while, and then chance suddenly came to our aid.
German artillery and mortars suddenly laid down a veritable carpet of shellfire over the open ground and into the forest around us.
It did not take long before the Russians answered, and it developed into a small artillery duel.
We took advantage of this, because as long as it continued, the soldiers would hardly be concerned with shooting at us. They had enough to do keeping their heads down.
We preferred to risk the shellfire rather than run into crossfire from machine guns from both friend and foe.
We sprang up and, in quick and lightning-fast bounds from shell hole to shell hole, crossed the open ground.
The distance was perhaps a kilometre, perhaps only half.
But shells whistled around our ears, and with our tongues hanging out and by what seemed a miracle of God, we all threw ourselves down unharmed behind a German machine-gun nest.
When we told the Germans our story, they were on the verge of taking us prisoner as suspicious persons.
They said that if they had not themselves had a patrol out and assumed it was that patrol returning, they would have shot us to pieces.
However, they had already made the acquaintance of our Danish comrades, who were now positioned on their left flank, so they accepted our story as genuine.
And we were certainly glad when we could return and report ourselves for a \u201cdressing-down\u201d from the commander because of our carelessness.
But we received no reprimand.
The commander was simply glad to see us, because there was a great need for us, and the situation in our sector was becoming quite serious. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2273,"template":"","personer":[104],"class_list":["post-2715","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\/2715","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=2715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"personer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/personer?post=2715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}