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

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  The sergeant who drove the first truck asked a passer-by for direction. The trucks turned north. Beyond the city we went by patches of forest, a coal mine, and the Hüls Chemical Factory, which was so well camouflaged that we didn’t see it. Eventually, standing by a road in front of a birch forest, we reached our destination, battery headquarters, a group of wooden barracks. We were expected. Our journey over a distance of a mere 50 kilometers as the raven flies, had taken us four hours.

  Hüls, 4th Battery, Leichte Flakabteilung 881. We climbed out of the trucks and stretched. A sergeant-major emerged from one of the barracks, battery headquarters as we learned, and received the report of the sergeant who had led our trucks. They exchanged a quick salute. He called us Flakhelfer to form up in ranks and wait. The battery chief stepped from headquarters and stood in front of us.

  We looked him over. He was an Oberleutnant, medium-sized, with an open face. No iron cross on his chest but a medal we didn’t recognize. He was a homeland Flak officer and had not been decorated for combat service. We wondered. Our two Reisholz officers, a Captain and a First Lieutenant, had both worn Iron Crosses first class for performance in action. He looked us over, too. He must have noticed that all of us wore the Flakkampfabzeichen we had earned in Reisholz on our dress uniforms. He greeted us and made us welcome.

  He explained that the battery consisted of four Züge (sections) spread along five kilometers at the northeastern edge of the Chemische Werke Hüls from the Rhein-Herne Kanal in the north to Zeche (coal mine) Ewald in the south. South of us and to the west three more batteries of light Flak with 2cm and 3.7cm guns formed a ring around the factory. Farther out was a second ring of Flak defenses, batteries of heavy guns of 8.8cm, 10.5cm and 12.8cm calibers. The light batteries were charged with protecting against low-level air attacks. The planes we had to be concerned about were American fighters like P-38 Lightnings, P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts. These had recently begun to fly daytime long range bomber escort into Germany. Low-level attacks on Hüls by American fighters should be expected.

  He paused. He didn’t seem to like what he was telling us. He informed us we were the new gun crews of the battery. His original gun crews had been transferred. He said he regarded us as experienced young soldiers and expected us to adapt quickly to the 2cm weapons. Assignments to the four sections would be handled by the sergeant-major. He looked at our faces, thoughtfully, perhaps with regret, even sorrow, saluted and dismissed us.

  The sergeant-major took our papers and divided us up among the sections. Six of us were ordered to 1. Zug, located in the birch forest north of headquarters. Another six to 2. Zug, on the south wall of the canal farther north. Five went to 4. Zug in the south, across from the entrance to coal mine Ewald. Fourteen to 5. Zug, the Vierling section, located in an open field southeast of headquarters. Five of us of the Reisholz shack were able to stay together, sent to 4. Zug: Ferdi, Thei, Wenner, Hannes and I. Bergittimus, our sixth buddy, was allotted to the Vierling section.

  While formalities were cleared and paperwork finished, the section chiefs were called in by radio and arrived to take charge of us. Ours was a slender, friendly man in his late 30s. He introduced himself to us as Corporal Sieber and learned our names. From his way of speaking, using sharp s-sounds, we thought he was from the Hamburg area. We gathered our gear and followed him to 4. Zug. We crossed the east-west trending hard-top road and walked on a foot trail south among birches and blackberry bushes. To the east lay an open field. In the middle, on the west side, stood three barracks and four sod-covered revetments. From three of them rose the barrels of Vierling guns. This was 5. Zug.

  As we walked the Corporal told us that the Hüls plant had been bombed severely once. It had been a daytime raid by American Fortresses on June 22 1943. No major attack had occurred since but one could come at any time. That was not good news. We would be sitting ducks in our 2cm gun stations with no chance to fight back as we had in Reisholz. He pointed out steel canisters spaced throughout the area. Nebeltonnen (smoke canisters), containers with a poisonous liquid that discharged a dense fog when ignited from a central command. These canisters were activated on days when enemy formations approached the Ruhr. Any such approach could have Hüls as the target. The whole huge factory complex was concealed by layers of camouflage nets. The first indication of enemy aircraft flying in would be the gushing of fog from the canisters, well before an antiaircraft alarm was sounded. The chemicals in the fog caused a burning sensation in eyes and respiratory systems. Breathing was difficult in this fog. What the unavoidable inhalation of this chemical soup would do to us in the long run nobody knew. Nothing good, we thought.

  One and a half kilometers south of headquarters we entered pine forest and came to a wooden tower with three floors above a ground-level storage bin. The corporal’s quarters were on the second floor, ours on the third. The fourth was the gun platform. The tower sat twenty meters east of a hard-top road that led from Recklinghausen past Zeche Ewald and the Hüls plant to the east-west road and headquarters. The gate of Ewald was straight across from us. We climbed the winding stairs that led up and around the tower and took our gear to the third floor. Behind the door were a nice living room and separated sleeping quarters with three bunk beds with two cots. We had three windows. One faced the street, the others south and north.

  After we put our gear away the corporal took us upstairs and removed the tarp from the body of the single barrel 2cm cannon. We were curious about the gun. We had never seen one before. He explained positions: K 1, the gun layer on a seat behind and to the right of the barrel; K 2, ammunition gunner, sitting on the left side of the gun, charged with feeding magazines into the breech; K 3, ammunition gunner, to supply the K 2 with magazines from a small bunker in the wooden side wall of the platform. He asked who wanted to be K 1. I volunteered. He accepted and explained that the other positions would be switched among us.

  Because only three of us were needed to serve the gun, we wondered what the other two would do. He said the battery expected to get one more gun to this section. There were two more Flak towers of 4. Zug behind us, currently empty. When the gun came, he would request one more Flakhelfer from headquarters. Both 1. and 2. Zug had two guns each; only 4. Zug had just one. He smiled and shook his head. It didn’t matter to him that we were not fully equipped. It didn’t bother us either.

  The tower had been built high enough so that the gun platform was well above the tops of the surrounding trees. We stood by the rampart and looked around. We had a clear field of fire to the southwest, west and northwest. The corporal pointed out where the factory stood hidden under its thick coat of camouflage. He told us that Hüls was considered the worst poison mill in the German chemical arsenal. Rumors had it that terrible, top secret concoctions were produced there. We had no reason not to believe him. Stationed on a high wooden tower, close to what had to be considered a prime target by English and American bomber commands, left us with a queasy feeling. He tried to dismiss our concerns. During an alarm, when high level attacks were expected, we were allowed to clear the tower and seek shelter below. Where? Was there a bomb shelter? No, he said, we had to take cover in foxholes. Had he done that we asked. Yes, he admitted, a few times.

  We wondered what we had gotten into.

  4. Zug. We learned quickly about the difference between a heavy Flak battery and a light one like the one we were in now. Where the heavies each had their own fire control command post with radar installations and optical equipment for visual ranging, our battery of 2cm guns had neither. We would receive instructions from a central command that alerted us to incoming and outgoing enemy formations and their operational heights. At night we would be blind. We could only shoot at what we could see. In daytime, enemy aircraft had to come into our limited range before we could go into action. Bombers, day and night, could only be reached by the heavies. We would be spectators to the drama that played out high above us. Although enemy fighters had been spotted in combat with German fighters, no
ne had yet come low enough for the Hüls light cannon. Night alarms could mean that our factory was a target and we should get ready to visit our foxholes.

  It took us only a short time to familiarize ourselves with the 2cm gun. I whirled the gun around, played with raising and lowering the barrel, and explored the sighting system. It was quite different from a rifle’s but could be managed. Work on the 8.8cm in Reisholz had been heavy duty. This was child’s play in comparison.

  On that first day we had missed lunch, taken in the mess hall at battery headquarters at 1200 hours every day. Breakfast and supper were delivered to us and our corporal from the kitchen by a Russian Hiwi. When he arrived that first evening we learned his first name was Sasha, and that he had been a mathematics teacher in a school at home. That was fortunate. We thought we might call on his expertise some time.

  We inspected the foxholes before we took to our cots. There was a brief alarm during the night. We stood on the gun platform around the corporal who wore earphones and a microphone, then retired to our quarters after the English bombers had flown on to Berlin.

  On the following morning we worked with the gun, satisfying our corporal. He was very laid-back, not a demanding person. He spent all his time in his room by the radio. We didn’t know what he listened to and didn’t care. We imagined that he listened to the BBC broadcasts but never asked him about it. Listening to the BBC was considered a serious offense by military authorities and could be severely punished. Our corporal turned out to be a good and decent man. He seemed to feel very lonely. Once he mentioned in passing that something serious had happened to his family in Hamburg, but did not explain. He kept it to himself, and we didn’t pry.

  Before lunch we had surveyed what there was of 4. Zug: two empty Flak towers, two wooden barracks with equipment, two ammunition bunkers dug into the ground and covered with sod, and our foxholes. We had walked through our patch of pine forest to the open field and gazed across to 5. Zug, the biggest of our outfits. This was our world now.

  Leisure Time. During this first week a pattern was set that was maintained for the whole time we were in 4. Zug and that was for most of our time in Hüls. In the mornings, after we took breakfast in our living room, and the corporal took it in his, we all met on the gun platform. We talked a little while about aircraft, theirs and ours, different types of fighter planes, their speed and armament. Sometimes we went through an exercise with the gun. But there was only so much to know, and we had learned it already. We split off quickly. The corporal went to his radio room and left us to our devices. Of course, we had to hang around the tower within the sound radius of the alarm bell. Sometimes we played soccer a stone’s throw away. Most of the time, in good weather, we stayed on the platform and read. I was able to read a lot. I finished all the books my mother got me from the old public library unter den Eichen. At nights, when the English flew by, we gathered on the platform, connected to a source of information through the corporal’s earphones. Once the bombers passed, we went back to our rooms. During a daytime alarm, we removed the tarp from the sleek 2cm and waited. Nothing came our way. Sometimes, at night, there was a brief alarm when an English Mosquito came over and dropped a single bomb on or near the factory, perhaps to remind us we were not forgotten. On such occasions we crouched in our foxholes, listening to the angry Flak fire of the heavies and, sometimes, hearing the awful whistling sound of a bomb coming down. I was relieved when I heard it. The saying was, “if you hear it, it’s gone somewhere else, if you don’t, it hits you.”

  Gunner’s tower, 4. Zug, Hüls, spring 1944.

  At the foot of 4. Zug gun tower. Author in middle, Ferdi to his right, Wenner to his left. Hüls, March 1944.

  Playing with a French machine-gun on 4. Zug gun platform. Wenner is in foreground, Thei in middle, Hannes in background. Hüls, summer 1944.

  Author on the gunner’s seat. 4. Zug, Hüls, spring 1944.

  At the first lunch after our arrival, we were fitted at headquarters with wooden clogs. We were expected to wear them in the sections and around the guns. We never figured out why. Was it to save shoe leather or had someone higher up made a special deal with a Dutch manufacturer? The clogs were cumbersome. We got used to them but never liked them. They made us slow and ponderous. Only on our midday trips to the mess hall could we wear shoes.

  The English attacked Berlin four times and Magdeburg once during our first three weeks, but passed the Ruhr by. American bombers were more active than the English at that time. They attacked Magdeburg and Halberstadt on January 27, Eschweiler on the 24th, Frankfurt on the 29th, Braunschweig and Hannover on the 30th, Frankfurt again on February 4, 8, and 11, and Braunschweig once more on the 10th. All these attacks were far away from us. Three times we saw vapor trails of American bomber boxes and twice we watched dog fights between Focke Wulf fighters and, we thought, Mustangs. They drew wild swirls and pirouettes across the sky, playing a deadly game before our eyes. Although we saw no victims and no victors, somewhere someone scored and someone died.

  My mother wrote me regularly; usually my father added a note. They tried to be positive but between the lines I understood their worry, and not for me alone. I knew what they thought, how despairing they had become. I wrote to them, too, telling them that I was safe. Compared to Reisholz, I told them, Hüls was like a vacation. We hardly had any duties and got much time for ourselves. Our gun chief was a fine man who, remarkably, imposed little on us.

  This was all true so long as one ignored the constant fear of a massive air attack on the factory. I didn’t mention that. We lived in pleasant isolation. We only saw the battery chief and the sergeant-major occasionally in the mess hall at lunch; none of them ever came for an inspection or even a visit. The only persons we were in constant contact with were the corporal and Sasha, our kitchen man. He waited while we had breakfast and supper, and when he left, we let him take the rest of the supplies home, including what we didn’t want. This, especially, was the sweet milk-noodle soup we had already encountered in Reisholz. It was exclusively served to Flakhelfer. Someone higher up must have thought we needed it since we were still growing up and all. But we despised the soup; Sasha and his fellow Russians seemed to love it.

  Despite bad things happening around us everywhere, we in 4. Zug, although bored sometimes, felt pretty good about ourselves and where we were. It could have been much worse.

  A bit of change that didn’t alter our general situation came on February 14, a Monday. All Flakhelfer of the battery met in the largest barrack available, the one of the gun crews of 5. Zug. Finally, a gymnasium teacher had been found who would teach classes for three hours on Monday and Tuesday mornings. He was a man in his fifties who had to travel to us by railroad from Dortmund, 30 kilometers away. Sometimes he could not reach Recklinghausen because of an air alarm. And sometimes we had to rush from class to our respective sections when our alarm bell tolled. Under these conditions, school was pretty haphazard.

  His teaching credentials were in math and chemistry, and these two fields he tried to convey to us. He was nothing like Wallerich, our math teacher in Reisholz, a man with a good heart and understanding from whom we had learned quite a bit despite the frequent alarms. This new teacher was an authoritarian, a hard man, a stickler for protocol. This was something we were not used to, even in our military experience. We were not cadets in a Nazi Party educational establishment. We saw ourselves as young soldiers who had already proven themselves. He must have felt our resentment, our growing hostility. He tried to break it down with even stiffer control. I didn’t work. We ignored him. He threatened not to pass us to the next higher grade, Untersekunda in gymnasium grade rankings. We heard this threat, but when the time came for this decision, some of us talked with our battery chief. He had a few words with the teacher and we were passed. I learned a bit more math during that time, but nothing in chemistry.

  Furlough. I got my first furlough in Hüls for the weekend of February 19-20. Early On Saturday morning I walked to the edge of Reck
linghausen where I took a streetcar to the railroad station. The city looked like others in the Ruhr and Rhineland. Over half the buildings and apartment complexes were destroyed. Most of the station lay in ruin, but the railroad track had been repaired. It was a wonder that the railroad system still functioned despite the savage destruction wrought by the bombings. The train south took me through Herne, Bochum, Essen, and Mülheim; each had been attacked many times. Now I saw the apocalyptic setting the Ruhr district had become from a train window. The view was worse than from our trucks. Because the railroad line went through the hearts of the cities, and the hearts of all these cities had been among the chief targets, the train passed through one scene of desolation after another. Arriving in the Düsseldorf main station was no reprieve from what I had seen passing through the others. After all, during my seven months in Reisholz our city had suffered severe attacks five times, on June 11-12 and 25-26, August 22-23, November 2-3 1943, and on January 4 1944. I had been there and recorded what happened in my diary.

  I arrived at my parents’ house in early afternoon. It had rained earlier. The streets were wet under a leaden sky. The great trees in front of the house, bereft of their foliage, looked dead with beds of dead leaves under them. The dark colors of winter lay everywhere, as dark as the stone masonry of our house, dark as the shale shingles that covered the steep roof. After the gloomy train journey through the desolation of the Ruhr cities, and the disheartening streetcar ride through the equally drab ruins of my home city, I had the overwhelming sensation that everything was dead or dying. I approached the heavy iron door of the entrance with its reddish patination and rang the bell. I knew that my parents expected me; I had written to tell them I would come.

  But then there was my mother, embracing me, laughing, but close to tears, my father’s somber face lightened by a big smile. I was surprised at the magnitude of their happiness at having me back. I was still dejected by what I had seen on the way home and by my gloomy thoughts. If they recognized my mood, they ignored it. They seemed determined to create as much joy from our reunion as possible. At first I shrank back, freezing up, but then, slowly, I yielded. Their happiness was contagious. My mother talked mostly about little things, old nice things we enjoyed remembering. Slowly, I began to feel comfortable. Spending day and night with my buddies, sharing danger and boredom, food and thought, experiences, everything, it set us apart from civilians, even from the people who should be closest to a sixteen year old, his parents.