Flakhelfer to Grenadier: Memoir of a Boy Soldier, 1943-1945

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  It was a shack, about seven by five meters, with a flat roof, a wooden door, and two windows on one side. Behind the door were six lockers, two small tables, three bunk beds with two cots each. Two upper cots were not yet taken. It seemed they were for us. There was no running water except for an outside faucet. The outdoor toilet, we were told, was a one-seater on the west side of the depot, about 250 meters away. Before the soldier left with the cart, we asked directions to guns Anton and Bertha. We changed into fatigues, stowed our gear in two empty lockers, and went toward the gun revetments. We crossed the railroad tracks and, behind the Russian camp, asked an elderly soldier where we could find the gun chiefs we had been ordered to see. He pointed to a line of barracks and singled out two.

  Through the open door I got my first look at Corporal Tylia. I hesitated and stopped. He sat with his back to me but had heard my footsteps. He got up and turned around. Slender, medium-sized, he looked at me with a question in his eyes. I said haltingly, something like, I had to report to him because the sergeant-major had assigned me to him and his gun. He asked for my name and where I lived, where I had been. After I told him, he said, “I’ll call you Paulchen.” I don’t know why and he never told me. Perhaps he knew a Paulchen and I looked similar to the one he knew. Or I simply looked, for other reasons, like a Paulchen to him. He always called me by that name during the many months I was stationed in Reisholz with him. He always acted somewhat fatherly toward me. There must have been something special for him about that name. Corporal Tylia was a friendly, at times melancholic, homesick man from East Prussia. He cared little about military etiquette but was strict in everything involving the gun, demanding flawless performance from the crew when in action.

  After he had given me a name, he told me that the gun crews were all unloading an ammunition train that had arrived earlier. He told me to come with him. He wanted to show me my workplace. The six gun emplacements of 2nd Battery were next to those of 1st Battery. They were arranged in circles with one in the center. The distance from gun to gun was about 60 meters. Bertha was in the northeast location of 2nd Battery. The grass-covered revetment was circular, higher than a tall person and a couple of meters thick. The entrance was at an angle and switched direction inside the wall so that the interior was not exposed should a bomb explode in front of it. The big gun was mounted on the four extensions of the gun carriage affixed to the ground (Kreuzlafette). On the inside, vertical timber planks held the wall. On one side was a bunker, shelter for the crew in bad weather when no immediate action was expected. A number of wooden doors covered the other sides. The space behind contained stacked ammunition crates with three shells apiece. Together they comprised 180 rounds, the Corporal told me. This number appeared sufficient for a night’s shooting. Occasionally up to 150 rounds, or Gruppen, had been fired during an especially turbulent night.

  He took me to the gun and explained the various positions. On the left side of the gun stood the K 1 (Kanonier 1, gunner 1), the elevation gun-layer, next to him, the K 2 (Kanonier 2, gunner 2), the azimuth gun-layer. The fuse setter, the K 6, sat on the right side on a seat in front of the fuse setting machine. These three positions were filled with Flakhelfer. They were boys from my school, he informed me. The ammunition gunners, K 4, K 5 and K 7 were Russians. The tasks of K 5 and K 7 were to supply the K 4 with shells that he would slip with their tips into the two receiving cups of the fuse setting machine. The K 3, the loader, was a lance-corporal. Tylia himself, the gun chief, would stand a few steps behind the gun during firing. I would be required to serve in the K 1, K2 and K 6 positions, rotating from one to the other. It would prevent boredom and keep us sharp.

  I don’t remember how I took the introduction to Bertha. I am sure the chief meant well and wanted to familiarize me a little with the gun before I, a complete novice, was added to a crew that operated as a well-functioning organism. He might have known that Paulchen was overwhelmed. He smiled briefly when he was through. He walked with me to where the crews of both batteries worked at the ammo bunkers unloading an ammunition train. He introduced me to the three Flakhelfer of his team. I knew them from my school. They had not been in the KLV program and thus were drafted to Reisholz in February. They knew the ropes. There was a bit of distance between us because they were not of the Einsiedel bunch. Circumstance and a few days would change that.

  I worked alongside them, lugging crates that weighed about a hundred pounds and carrying crates with empties that weighed much less. Much of the heavy lifting was done by the Russians. I saw Ferdi and the other four who had been in Einsiedel: Thei, Hannes, Bergittimus and Wenner, room mates in the shack by the depot, our new home. They were already blending in.

  Before noon the train had been unloaded and took off with a cargo of crates with empty shell cases. Soldiers and Flakhelfer walked to lunch at the mess hall in the birch forest, a mere 350 meters away. Flakhelfer of 2nd Battery and some working in the Mess-Staffel were from Rethel Gymnasium. Those with 1st Battery, including a few in the Mess-Staffel, were from Hilden Gymnasium. The Rethel kids sat with their NCOs and soldiers while the Hilden kids ate with their teammates. There was not much exchange between the two groups of Flakhelfer even though they were members of one Grosskampfbatterie (term for a battery that combined two enlarged regular batteries for added firepower) and shared identical tasks. Perhaps a sort of buddy system was used here. The boys who had grown up and been in school together were allowed to stay together. There was no competition between the two groups. Performance levels were the same.

  Where soldiers and Flakhelfer strolled in small groups to the mess hall everyday, the Russians made a dramatic entry. They gathered at their camp, formed in ranks and marched up in military fashion, singing Russian marching songs. They were led by their commander, a German Sergeant, who spoke Russian fluently and lived and slept in one of their barracks. He mostly stayed away from other German soldiers and his fellow NCOs. From the Russians he demanded an excessive discipline and punished any transgression severely.

  Lunch was the only time the members of the batteries came together. Breakfast at 0800 (0900 after a night alarm) and supper, at 1800, were collected by individual barracks at the kitchen. Often, for supper, big jugs of a sweet milk and noodle soup were added specifically for Flakhelfer to the regular fare of cold food and coffee. We did not like this creation much. What we could not finish, and that was most of it, we passed on to the Russians who had greater appetite than us kids and seemed to be genuinely fond of the sweet stuff.

  After lunch, on that first afternoon in Reisholz, Corporal Tylia told Werner and Walter, two of the Flakhelfer of the Bertha crew, to show me, after the midday break, what kind of work they did on the gun. I met them at 1400 in the revetment. Gun-layer K 1 (elevation), K 2 (azimuth) and K 6 (fuse setting) operated their controls with wheels like the steering wheel of a car, following a command pointer with the position pointer. During fire alarm the shifting command pointers on the screens of the three positions had to be covered precisely and fully with the position pointers regardless of what happened within the embankment, outside or in the sky above. At first glance that did not seem difficult. But considering the ear-splitting noise of firing, the bucking of the gun, rapid changes of direction and elevation, stumbling over the extension of the gun carriage and empty shell cases thrown over the ground, it was hard to stay glued to the pointers in front of one’s eyes.

  This they told me. Because we were not in alarm phase, the system was not on and they could not demonstrate how it was done. That could only happen during action – perhaps that night or the next night, they thought. They shrugged. They said that the battery had been in action at least twice a week and on an air raid alert almost every other night. They said that the English attacked during the night, the Americans during the day. The Americans had begun bombing in early February 1943, mostly cities along the North Sea coast. Only twice, so far, they had attacked a city close to the Ruhr, Hamm. The boys had not seen American planes yet. The Eng
lish came almost every night, bombing cities somewhere in Germany. Sometimes, on their way back, the stream of bombers came close enough that the Reisholz 8.8 could reach them.

  Werner pulled a calendar notebook from his breast pocket. He flipped through the pages. “From May 1 to today, June 10, let’s see, the English bombed close to us…” he counted slowly, “eight times: Essen, May 1, Dortmund May 5, Duisburg, May 13, Bochum, May 14, Dortmund again, May 24, Düsseldorf, yes, our city, May 26, Essen again, May 28, Wuppertal, May 30.” He paused. “During some of these raids we did a lot of shooting, especially during the attack on our city and on Wuppertal.” He put his notebook away. They looked at each other.

  “We saw many cities burn,” Walter said. “Sometimes you can see the fires from a hundred kilometers away or more. Clouds turn red in the sky from the fires below. Smoke hangs in the air for days afterward.” He stopped. He had talked about something they had already seen too often.

  “How are your parents?” I asked.

  “We were lucky, they were lucky. The Altstadt was partly destroyed,” Werner said. He sighed. “The parts where our parents live did not get hit much.”

  We were silent for a while. Then I asked about school in the battery. They laughed. “We are supposed to have school Monday to Wednesday in the mess hall after lunch. But sometimes we don’t. We either have a readiness call or the teacher could not make it because the city was under air raid alarm and all traffic had stopped.”

  “Who are the teachers?” I asked.

  “Pedi and Wallerich.” Pedi was the nickname for Dr. Peltzer who taught Latin and History. He was a friendly man, popular among students and generous with grades. Wallerich I knew from the Bad Spindelmühle KLV camp. He was a fine math teacher, demanding but patient, understanding.

  They asked me about Bad Einsiedel and I told them. They listened with little interest. What I described seemed to them far away, a fairyland. I was beginning to feel that way too. Einsiedel was quickly becoming a blur, retreating before a new and harsh reality.

  They told me something I was eager to hear. Flakhelfer were allowed two weekend furloughs a month to visit with their parents, provided their positions in the battery were covered by someone else. Because we six newcomers had been added as fourth Flakhelfer per gun, a few of the old crews had a chance to get a furlough on the next weekend. By then we were expected to be fit for action. I saw Einsiedel slipping away even further into the shadows.

  We talked a little more about things that concerned us. Shortly before 1800, the time for supper, I left to join my old buddies in the shack by the railroad depot. Our reunion was subdued. Too much had happened that day. Two of us went for our food but we ate as if chewing wood. The coffee can – coffee not made from real coffee beans but from a substitute, a sorry tasting brew – was cleaned and returned to the kitchen. We talked briefly about the people we had met. We went to our cots early. There was no alarm during the night.

  Whit Saturday, June 11-12. At 0700 the bell on the wall in our shack rang out the wake- up call. The same bell would chase us out of bed for a night alarm. I .had made the acquaintance of the outhouse the night before. I paid it another visit in the morning and, in daylight, admired the decorations on the walls. They were from German magazines, photographs from musicals highlighting scores of scantily dressed dance girls. After washing up and putting our shack in order, Ferdi, Thei and I went for our breakfast. It consisted of Kommissbrot, the typical fare of rye bread baked for the military, a sliver of margarine, a hard slice of a honey substitute, a small cut of sausage and the obligatory coffee. When we had eaten we went to our gun emplacements.

  I was introduced to the K 3, the loader, a muscular, quiet lance-corporal. The gun chief explained the mechanism of the 8.8cm gun to me and showed me every feature within the revetment. He gave me a brochure to study. It contained pictures of enemy aircraft and information about the capabilities of each. The types that naturally most concerned the Flak gunners in Germany were Viermots, four-engined bombers. English Viermots were the Stirling, Halifax and Lancaster. Of these the Lancaster was regarded as the best plane. American Viermots were the B 17 Fortress and the B 24 Liberator. Both were rumored to be as good as the Lancaster although they had not yet to be seen in our neighborhood. The one type that was an enigma was the Mosquito, a two-engine English plane of great speed that served as pathfinder and marked the target area for the bomber stream. Rarely was one shot down. The plane’s body was largely built of wood to escape radar detection. On cloudless nights a pathfinder was sometimes caught by searchlights and rode the apex of light beams from the ground prior to an attack. The attack was preceded by light cascades in red and green dropped by the Mosquito. We called these Christbäume (“Christmas trees”).

  After lunch we spent the midday break in our shack talking. We had learned the essentials. Our home base was the shack where we slept and ate our breakfast and supper. We knew where headquarters and the mess hall were. We knew the gun and crew we had been attached to, the ammo bunkers, both those beside the railroad tracks and the ones in the gun revetments. The first were the sources from which those at the gun were replenished after a shoot. And we knew our outhouse. Our life from then on would revolve around these points. Our world was as narrow as it had been in Einsiedel but more regulated, less open, a lot simpler if not entirely primitive. We had been thrown into something that we did not yet understand. We couldn’t articulate this well, but we felt it. We were somehow reassured because the kids who had come here in February must have felt the same way at the beginning. They had gotten through it. They seemed to be all right.

  After the break we went to headquarters where our photos were taken and we received our Flakhelfer identification cards. We were informed that Flakhelfer received a pay of 0,50 Reichsmark (50 pennies) per day and that travel by means of public transformation was free to us. The afternoon we spent again with our respective guns and crews. In the Bertha revetment, that included the three Russian ammunition gunners who served as K 4, K 5, and K 7. They wore fragments of Russian uniforms supplemented with Luftwaffe fatigues. Two were in their late twenties, one in his early thirties. These were the first Russians I had seen in person and I tried not to gawk at them. At first glance they seemed guarded. Many turned out to be pretty good men, with whom we spent the long nights standing together by the revetment wall staring into the dark. We tried to communicate with each other across the chasm created by the war. Neither I nor they, nor anyone else, was in control of anything, least of all concerning our personal fates. They learned a little more German from us. I learned, in exchange, a little Russian including a remarkable set of Russian swearwords. As members of the gun crew they proved to be dependable under any circumstances.

  After supper was leisure time. We spent it reading and having small talk. At 2100 the light had to be out and we went to our cots.

  The bell rang after 2300. Alarm! We jumped onto the wooden floor and quickly dressed. We grabbed overcoats, steel helmets and gas masks and rushed out. There was a solid cloud cover and the ground lay in darkness. We went as quickly as was possible. Because our shack was farthest from the guns, I arrived at Bertha last.

  The crew stood in a group around the gun. My eyes got used to the dark and I could distinguish faces. The chief wore headphones and a microphone. He listened to the command post. He and the K 3 were smoking cigarettes. The three Russians smoked hand-rolled cigarettes of the rough, grainy Russian machorka tobacco they got in their rations. Flakhelfer were not allowed to smoke. Faces were somber, those of the kids too. They had been through this before. No one spoke. We stood in silence for quite a while. We waited. The land all around us, including the city just to the north lay in complete darkness.

  The chief raised his hand. Information was being passed to him from the command post. “Bomber formations approaching the Dutch coast, nearing Amsterdam,” he said. This did not have to mean much to us. Amsterdam was about 180 kilometers northwest of Düsseldorf. If the bombers
stayed on their present course they would bypass us by about 125 kilometers, going for a target farther east.

  We waited.

  After about twenty minutes the next report came in. “Leading formations over Arnhem.” The bombers had changed directions. Arnhem was less than 100 kilometers WNW. Throughout the Ruhr area, from Bottrop to Essen and Duisburg, the air raid alarm for the civilian populations would be given. Some time passed, then, far away to the north, we saw the bottom of the dense mass of clouds lit by the brilliant white-blue tentacles of searchlights, moving around, fingers of doom touching but not penetrating the mass above. The Flak crews and nightfighter pilots called this ghostly spectacle Leichentuch, “the shroud.” Because of impaired visibility, optical instruments were of no help and the batteries would be directed by radar.

  Map of the Northern Rhineland and the Ruhr District.

  Waiting. Finally, “Get ready, the chief said. We put our helmets on. I was nudged by someone and reminded to plug my ears with cotton balls. The crew took up positions. The Russians opened the ammo bunkers. The K 6 mounted the chair in front of the fuse setting machine. “Gun position 11,” the chief shouted. The K 2 wheeled the gun in this direction.

  It did not take long and the report came, “Leading formations over Goch.” Now they were 60 kilometers away. There still was no telling what their target would be. Perhaps another attack on one of the Ruhr cities, Essen, Duisburg, or some other? The chief reported to the command post, “Gun Bertha ready.”