An incident near the end of World War II, seventy-seven years ago:

Battlegroup Hammer

By 1942 limitations in the supply of aircraft and aviation fuel had curtailed plans to further expand the Luftwaffe’s flying strength. This left the Luftwaffe with more manpower than it needed, at a time when manpower shortages had begun to affect the German military as a whole. Hitler ordered Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering to transfer over two hundred thousand surplus personnel for ground combat service.

Goering, in an effort to maintain at least nominal control of the men, prevailed upon Hitler to let them serve together in “Luftwaffe Field Divisions.” Instead of serving to keep experienced units up to strength, the men were concentrated in poorly-trained, poorly-equipped, entirely green formations. The results were predictably disastrous. By early 1944, most Luftwaffe field divisions had been destroyed, usually by their first contact with a major enemy offensive.

An exception to this rule was 12th Luftwaffe Field Division. This unit managed a credible, if not particularly distinguished, record in several campaigns. In early 1945 the division, by now badly understrength like most German divisions, was transferred from Courland by ship to the old Prussian port of Danzig (modern Gdansk, Poland) to beef up its defenses.

Danzig’s defenders expected a Soviet attack from the east. Instead, in the first week of March, 2nd Belorussian Front, under Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, drove north through Pomerania to the Baltic. Elements of Rokossovsky’s force then pivoted and drove toward Danzig from the west.

In this excerpt from his memoir, The Hammer of Hell, Colonel Hans von Hammer, the German fighter ace who had been transferred to 12th Luftwaffe Field Division to serve as a regimental commander after being grounded for reasons of age, describes how he found an unexpected opportunity during this period.


All of our family’s property, all of our surviving relatives and retainers, all of our tenants, now lay in the path of the onrushing enemy hordes. And only some fifty kilometers away by road, Danzig, which promised at least temporary safety, and the prospect of evacuation by sea to the west. It seemed to me that Fate had placed me so close to home at this point for a reason. I must at all costs do what I could to rescue family, friends, and tenants.

On eighth of March I went to Saucken [General Dietrich von Saucken, commander of 2nd Army ed.] and requested permission to select a battlegroup from among 12th Luftwaffe’s men, together with transport, to attempt an evacuation. It was an outrageous request. I wanted permission to hazard precious transport, men, and petrol, at a time when all three were in desperately short supply, for a personal mission.

But Saucken, himself a Prussian whose people were in similar danger east of Konigsberg, understood. He gave me the permission I sought. That same day, we learned that the Reds had taken Stolp. They would surely be in Lauenberg within a couple more days. And only a few kilometers to the east of Lauenberg…. We had not one moment to waste!

I spent the ninth assembling my forces. “Battlegroup Hammer” consisted of about two hundred of the division’s best remaining men, fourteen military lorries, two “Howling Cow” mobile rocket launchers, and several requisitioned civilian vehicles. We had no heavy equipment beyond the rocket launchers. Our only defense against enemy armor consisted of “Armored Fist” armor-piercing grenades. The slender means at our disposal would have to do.

On the night of the ninth we left Danzig headed north and west. I rode in the lead vehicle. As always Heiligeist [Corporal Jakob Heiligeist, Hammer’s adjutant ed.] accompanied me. The journey should have taken only an hour or two in normal times. This evening we found ourselves pressing against a vast human tide moving along the moonlit roads. There were thousands of them—women, children, and old folks, all desperately fleeing toward Danzig in the face of the Red advance.

Mile after mile we forced our way through the crowds at a snail’s pace. It seemed as though all of East Pomerania and West Prussia was on the road. Every horse that still drew breath had been harnessed to every sort of conveyance imaginable. Beside the wagons the walkers struggled through the slush of late winter, carrying babies, the occasional pet, and whatever poor possessions they could manage. Though we raged against the loss of precious time, we could not blame them for fleeing. We had all heard of the savagery of the enemy’s troops in East Prussia and in Silesia.

Heiligeist was in one of his subdued moods as we crept along. His eyes seemed to take in the whole pitiable spectacle. “They do well to flee,” he said at one point. “Those of us who have served in the East know what a great load of wrath our conduct there has stored up against our people. `And I heard another voice from heaven saying, Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.’”

“That’s quite enough of that!” I said. I recognized his quotation from the Apocalypse of Saint John. I did not care for Heiligeist’s implicit parallel between the German people and the great Whore of Babylon. And yet….

Now and then we encountered a detachment of “People’s Attack” militia. They were old men and boys, with a sprinkling of middle-aged men who had until now been exempted from conscription for one reason or another. Few had uniforms. Perhaps half had proper rifles, and these usually old models captured from defeated enemies earlier in the war. Others carried “fists.” Some had no military gear at all beyond an armband that denoted their status as alleged combatants.

This threadbare home guard could not reasonably have been expected to perform any useful service beyond policing rear areas and wrangling refugees. Yet many would soon lose their lives, fighting to the best of their pathetic ability in the desperate hope that their resistance might delay the enemy long enough for more refugees to escape.

We reached our destination at about dawn. We had just enough time to hide our vehicles in the copse called “Monk’s Wood,” where my brothers and cousins and I had once spent days playing at soldiers. It was well that we had a place of concealment. Throughout the day we saw enemy hunter-bomber aircraft criss-crossing the skies, seeking targets of opportunity. I noticed that many of the hunt-bombers were American-built Bell “Cobra” aircraft, readily identifiable by their distinctive automotive door-style side cockpit hatches.

We could not afford to be idle during the day. We set several eager young lads from the local People’s Attack unit to work running around the neighborhood, instructing the staff and tenants of the estate to make their way to Monk’s Wood before dark if they did not wish to be left behind. Meanwhile we kept a careful watch out. I had the men lie down to sleep in shifts, so that they would be rested when we moved out that evening.

For my part, I slept for a few hours in my own bed in the family home a short distance from the wood. Our ancestral home was far from the finest or most impressive of Prussian country seats. Yet we had lived there a good two and a half centuries, ever since the days of the Great Elector. And now our tenure was about to come to a decisive end. I could not resist roaming the rooms one final time, recalling my youth and the happy times I had had with family. It seemed to me the greatest of mercies that Father had died a little before the war, and that Mother had followed a few years later.

After my nap, I snatched up a few mementoes—certain family portraits; the medal that my grandfather had earned at Mars-la-Tour; the decoration that his grandfather had received at the recommendation of Gneisenau for his own service during the Napoleonic Wars; the copy of Lilienthal’s Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation that had spurred my interest in flying as a boy. Altogether I took only what I could carry in one go. I might easily have filled an entire lorry with beloved family possessions, but we had too little room as it was.

Toward evening, as we awaited the oncoming sanctuary of darkness, a militia youth on a bicycle arrived at Monk’s Wood in a frantic hurry. “The Ivans have taken Lauenburg!” he cried. “Their advance tanks will be here on the road within the hour!”

I ordered the Howling Cow vehicles into position facing along the road from Lauenburg. Then I moved forward a little and stationed picked men with Fists to deal with any armor that approached. I had no sooner returned from making these deployments when we saw the enemy’s advanced armored element in the distance. We counted at least five T-34s, with accompanying motorized infantry, approaching in the dusk, scattering the terrified refugees along the road.

As soon as they were well within range, I ordered the launchers to fire. The rockets took off with that ghastly howling sound for which their carrier vehicles had earned their name. There was, of course, little chance of the un-aimed rockets actually hitting any of the enemy tanks. They served to disconcert their crews and infantry support sufficiently for the anti-armor teams to approach within the suicidally-close distance required by their short range. Two T-34s were destroyed, a third damaged. The men who had fired the fatal shots were not among those who came running back to us in the gathering gloom. I promised that the lost men’s sacrifice would not be in vain.

By now it was dark. We moved out. There were just over three hundred civilians with us. Those too old, or too young, or otherwise unable to walk well were loaded onto the lorries and civilian vehicles. We put several into the Howling Cows, which, with their rockets now fired, were now nothing more than ordinary lorries themselves. Our men, and the more able-bodied civilians, walked alongside the vehicles. How many kilometers could we manage to put between the enemy and ourselves during the night?

As it happened we made nearly thirty. A credible accomplishment for able infantrymen in such conditions, truly astonishing for the civilians, burdened as they were by their children and their belongings. Many a soldier shouldered the load of a suitcase, or a bedroll, or a child during that night.

By morning all were bone-weary. We went to ground for the day and rested. Along toward the afternoon, we had word that the Reds were drawing near once again. Again, it was only an advance element, but we had shot our bolt and had little left with which to resist them. We must move on, regardless of the desperate risk of moving in open country by daylight. I instructed Heiligeist to pray harder than he had ever prayed before for our safety from the enemy hunt-bombers that flew above us, prepared to attack any mechanized transport that moved.

I allowed our formation to be dispersed into elements of only three or four vehicles each, in the hope that smaller concentrations would be less likely to draw enemy attack. It was a glorious late-winter day. We traveled beneath cloudless skies of brilliant blue. Conditions could not have been any better for aircraft—or worse for us! We crawled along at a walking pace for hour after hour, fearfully scanning the skies for aircraft.

Early that afternoon the luck of my party seemed to run out. A pair of Bell hunter-bombers passed over us, turned, descended to treetop level, and made straight for our vehicles. I knew even before I saw them banking for a turn what was about to happen. I ordered my driver to make an immediate halt. Everybody bailed out of their vehicles and dropped to the ground. We had no sooner done so when the hunt-bombers opened fire. I saw the heavy bullets tearing through the sides of our just-vacated vehicles. I have no ideea how the children and infirm folk in them managed to get out in time.

Then we heard the roar of engines as the aircraft passed just over us. We braced ourselves for another pass. It did not come. The two “Cobras” merely proceeded on their way. I suppose they might have been low on ammunition. Or, just possibly, the sight of women and children piling out of our vehicles in a panic sparked some humane impulse on the part of the pilots.

Incredibly, only one of our lorries had been damaged too badly to continue. Even more incredibly, there were no casualties, apart from one soldier wounded by splinters. I ordered the wrecked vehicle manhandled out of the road, and had the passengers redistributed as best we could into the remaining vehicles.

Others were not so lucky. There were many attacks from the air up and down the roads that day. We passed numerous victims sprawled alongside the road—fighting men, and civilians of every sort, and horses and cattle, and smashed vehicles. We allowed ourselves to cast hardly a glance at them.

We also passed people in every sort of distress. Conveyances had broken down. Horses had collapsed from exhaustion. People had likewise lost the ability or will to go on. Some begged us to take them with us aboard our vehicles. I could not accept any of them, as our vehicles already had all aboard that they could carry. Indeed, they were now so overloaded that I doubt we could again have dismounted from them so quickly in the event of another attack.

We did take one exhausted mother and her infant, when the man who had been wounded in the attack gallantly gave up his place in a lorry for her. A comrade and a militia youth assisted him in marching along. They half-carried him to Danzig. I would have given them all commendations, had regulations allowed for it.

We reached Danzig sometime after dark. I detailed Heiligeist to see about getting our people to some sort of accommodations, while I waited beside the road for the rest of our straggling battlegroup to come in. The last of them arrived well after midnight. The element traveling next behind us had also been attacked from the air. They had lost two lorries. Some of the displaced passengers from these had had to wait until others from our column arrived and somehow made space for them. In addition, a fourth lorry had run off the road in a slippery section and been too damaged to continue. The engine of a fifth, much patched up, had finally yielded up the ghost and forced its abandonment.

Altogether we had lost five precious lorries, and eleven men killed or missing. Another six had been wounded. Of the three hundred civilians who set out with us from Monk’s Wood, not one failed to arrive at Danzig. It was, Heiligeist said, nothing short of a miracle. I could not disagree.

In the days that followed, Colonel Hammer saw to it that the civilians that he had evacuated from his family estate were placed aboard ships and evacuated to the west, along with the wounded from 12th Luftwaffe Field Division. The rest of the division stayed in the besieged city of Danzig until Saucken ordered its evacuation the night of March 27th. In early May the division’s last remnants surrendered and passed into Soviet captivity.

(This is excellent stuff, Daphne!)

Thanks, SImon!

Out of curiosity, what sort of things did you like about it?