Military History Photo Friday: The Volkshandgranate 45, A Grenade Made Out Of Concrete:

I've been reading Antony Beevor's excellent history book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 as part of my research for my Volkssturm novel. The Volkssturm were a German civilian militia formed in October 1944 in a last desperate bid to stop the Allied advance. The Volkssturm called up all able-bodied men aged 16 to 60 who weren’t already in uniform. It also called up some women.

A passing mention in Beevor's book told me of a weapon I didn't know about--the Volkshandgranate 45, or the "people's hand grenade 1945". This crude grenade was developed in the last months of the war and was the product of a chronic shortage of raw material. By this time most of the Third Reich's industrial base had been taken by the Russians, and the Germans resorted to making hand grenades out of concrete. These would be filled with bits of scrap metal, gravel, and nuggets of cement. The whole thing was fitted with a fuse and some explosive. Beevor says the Volkshandgranate 45 was more dangerous to the user than the target, and yet hundreds of thousands of them were produced in the last months of the war and distributed to the Volkssturm, Wehrmacht, and even some elite SS units.

It just goes to show how desperate the Third Reich had become in the last months of its existence. As the Nobel Prize winning author Heinrich Böll, who was drafted in to the army during the war, put it, the men were fighting not for their country, but for survival, and their only hope was that they would somehow survive after they were defeated.

Military History Photo Friday: The Volkssturm

An often-reproduced photo of the Volkssturm on parade. In reality they weren't this well armed. They had been given the weapons for the parade and had to return them afterwards!

As I mentioned last Friday, I'm researching my next Trench Raiders book, which will focus on the tunnelers of World War One. I'm also in the beginning stages of researching a book set in the waning days of World War Two titled Volkssturm.

The Volkssturm was a German national militia started in October 1944, which called up all able-bodied Germans, both men and women, aged 16 to 60.

A female member of the Volkssturm learning how to use a Panzerfaust.

By this late in the war the Germans were getting pretty desperate. The Red Army was crushing them in the east; the Americans, British, and Canadians were rolling through France; and the Allies dominated the skies. The fall of Nazi Germany has always been an epic subject, and it will be interesting to write characters stuck in this backdrop. War stories tend to focus on soldiers or, less often, civilians. This novel will focus on civilians forced to be soldiers. The characters are still forming in my mind. So far they're both men and women from a range of ages, most with only lukewarm and waning support for the ideology that has led their nation to disaster. Being civilians, they are far more concerned with their homes, families, and future than the strategy and tactics of war. Now that the war has come to them they each have to make a choice of what to do about it.

As I said, I'm only just beginning to research this topic so I won't start writing for a while. I have a few other projects lined up first. Stay tuned!

At the front in East Prussia, January 1945.

 

Building an anti-tank barrier in Cologne in February 1945. Note the wagons. By this point the Germans had a critical shortage of gasoline. Advancing Allied armies would often find perfectly usable vehicles abandoned by the side of the road because the retreating Germans had run out of gas.

The Volkssturm had no uniform. Some members got castoff uniforms from various units, including a lot of uniforms from the mostly grounded Luftwaffe. Many of the civilians soldiers had no other identification than this armband.

Photos courtesy Bundesarchiv.

Military History Photo Friday: What's this Bizarre Contraption?

Photo courtesy Marcin Szala

This photo was taken in the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany. What do you think it is? An old boiler they took out of the basement and were too lazy to send to the scrapheap? An unfinished Panzer tank? The world's ugliest recycling bin?

Nope, it's one of the world's first submarines. It's the Brandtaucher (“Incendiary Diver”), built in 1850 by the Germans to stop the Danish Navy from blockading German ports. It's as big and clunky as it looks, measuring 26 ft. 6 in. (8 meters) in length, with a beam of 6 ft. 8 in. (2 meters) and a height of 8 ft. 8 in. (2.6 meters).

Below is a sketch from an 1896 book showing how it operated. The crew walked on a treadmill to turn the propeller, while ballast came from letting water into the space below them. This made the sub heavier than the surrounding water and let it submerge. The water could then be pumped out, reducing the weight and making the submarine go to the surface.

One fault of the design was not having sealed ballast tanks. Instead the water sloshed around at the bottom of the interior, causing the sub to become unstable. This is what probably made it sink before it could attack any ships. The crew was able to escape and swim to safety by opening the hatch. This caused water to rush in, increasing the air pressure and shooting them out of the hatch, from where they could swim to the surface. The sub was raised in 1887 and has been on display ever since.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Military History Photo Friday: German Artillery of World War One

I'm hard at work on No Man's Land, book 3 in my Trench Raiders series, and the guys are having a bit of trouble with German artillery. They've been mucking about in No Man's Land, trying to assert their primacy over the space between the opposing lines, and now the Germans are telling Willoughby, Crawford, and the rest of the gang what they think of their antics by lobbing over a bunch of shells.

It's only a year into the war, so the Germans are still using a lot of older field guns, like the 7.7 cm Feldkanone 96 shown above in this image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. As the name suggests, they first came out in 1896 and by 1915 were well out of date with current technology. The piece had a significant recoil that meant it needed to be adjusted after each shot, thereby reducing the rate of fire.

Most were remodeled just before the war with a recoilless system plus a new carriage and front shield. They were given the added specification n.A. (neuer Art, meaning "new model"). This model proved much more useful and was the standard German field gun throughout the first two years of the war. One can be seen in the photo below photo courtesy Drake Goodman. Both models used a crew of five, so I'm not sure who the extra guys were. Perhaps they just wanted to have their photograph taken!

These two models were specifically designed as mobile field artillery. It soon became apparent, however, that the Germans were going nowhere fast. The guns' effective range of 5,500 meters was considered insufficient and in 1916 a new model came out, the 7.7 cm FK 16 with an effective range of 9,100 meters.

It had a much longer barrel that could be brought to a higher angle, as can be seen in this Wikimedia Commons photo, and it weighed considerably more. By this point in the war mobility no longer mattered, range and destructive power did. While this proved a more useful gun, shortages in German industry by this point meant that older field guns remained in use until the end.

The average British soldier came to know these guns all too well, being on the receiving end of their shots day in and day out. In fact, they probably knew more about German artillery than their own. No one wanted to get near the artillery of their own side because it was so often a target of the enemy!

Military History Photo Friday: Hitler Youth Prisoners of War

Near the end of the Second World War, seventy years ago, the Third Reich had a serious manpower shortage. Most of the men of fighting age had been killed, wounded, or captured. Older men were conscripted to fill the ranks, and the boys of the Hitler Youth were also called to fight the Allies.

Some of these kids weren't even in their teens. Allied soldiers felt terrible shooting at them, but also had to admit that the young troops often fought very well, having been brainwashed by their upbringing and being too young to fear death. The Allies tried to capture these kids when they could, and there are numerous photographs showing just how young some of them were.

One of the worst things the Third Reich did was to corrupt children with the Nazi ideology. For the Black Gate blog, I recently reviewed a German film from the era titled Hitlerjunge Quex, about a famous member of the Hitler Youth. Originally intended as fascist propaganda, it has strangely morphed in its meaning for modern viewers to have an anti-fascist message.

Military History Photo Friday: The Last Nazi Government Surrenders

Happy VE Day! On this day in 1945, the last organized Nazi forces surrendered to the Allies.

The process actually began on May 4, when the Flensburg government, the successor government appointed by Hitler in his last will and testament shortly before shooting himself on April 30, surrendered to the British. They had controlled Denmark, Netherlands, and northwestern Germany.

This photo shows British officers leading away three of its leaders. President Karl Dönitz (center, in long, dark coat) is followed by Albert Speer (bareheaded) and Alfred Jodl. They prolonged surrender negotiations as long as they could to help surviving German forces flee west so they could surrender to the Allies instead of the Soviets. After what the Nazis had done to Russia in the past few years, they didn't want to end up at the mercy of the Russians.

Soon the Allies told them to stop stalling, and in the early hours of May 7, Dönitz made the announcement, "All forces under German control to cease active operations at 23:01 hours Central European Time on 8 May 1945."

Dönitz spent ten years in prison for war crimes and then lived a quiet life in Germany until his death in 1980.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Military History Photo Friday: Swiss WWI Postcard

Back in high school, one of my friends had a father from Switzerland. He told me a story about how during World War Two, Hitler was speaking to the Swiss ambassador. The Nazi leader arrogantly pointed out, "The Swiss army only has 100,000 men. What if I sent a million men against you?"

To which the Swiss ambassador dryly replied, "Then my men would each have to fire ten times."

A wonderful bit of propaganda that has stayed in my memory for 25 years! 

Right now I'm up in Oxford for my usual summer of research and travel. I'm busy researching and writing Digging In, book two of my Trench Raiders series of World War One action novels. While rummaging through various books I came across a collection of Swiss postcards from WWI. Switzerland never fought in the war but they were concerned with German expansionism. It turns out the anecdote about Hitler had been recycled from an earlier conflict. This card show a conversation between a Swiss soldier and the German Kaiser. A rough translation reads:

"In the land of the great marksmen.

Good job, son! You have 100,000 marksmen in Switzerland. What will you do when 200,000 Prussians come?

Ah, we'll shoot two bullets, Majesty!"

Book Review: The Marne, 1914, by Holger Herwig

The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World by Holger H. Herwig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book right after reading the author's excellent The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918. That book offered a sweeping history of the war trough the experience of the Central Powers with plenty of interesting anecdotes from common people.

I wish Herwig had written his book on the Battle of the Marne the same way. He goes into excruciating detail about troop movements from the opening moves of the war all the way up to the Germans' fateful decision to withdraw and regroup at the Marne in the face of fierce French counterattacks. We're treated to a flurry of facts about what corps marched behind what, who flanked who, all of it quickly becoming confusing thanks in no small part to the insufficient maps.

I'm an avid student of military history, yet I must say this sort of battle study has always bored me. I'm far more interested in the common solder's experience and the sociological and political implications of war than I am in a long list of what units marched where. For people interested in tactical detail, this is one of the best books on the battle, but for those wanting the human side of the war, go elsewhere.

View all my reviews

Military History Photo Friday: Romania Defeated in World War One

This is an Austro-Hungarian propaganda poster from 1916 celebrating the defeat of Romania. That year Romania joined the allies fighting Germany and Austro-Hungary on the promise of territorial gains. Their army was woefully out-of-date, however, and a quick offensive by the Central Powers crushed them.

Here a German and Autro-Hungarian soldier are celebrating a round as the prisoners come racing in. In reality both armies had supply shortages by this time. The Austro-Hungarian soldier would have been dressed in tattered clothing and neither would have been drinking beer unless they had plundered it from some Romanian village.

The defeated army is interesting too. Not only does it show Romanian soldiers (who surrendered in droves, often not having fired a shot) and their Russian allies but also British and even a Colonial Sikh soldier. Well, there's nothing like a good bit of propaganda!

An interesting footnote to this campaign is that a young German Lieutenant named Erwin Rommel distinguished himself during the fighting. He wrote an excellent analysis of the campaign. I've read it, but I can't seem to find it online. Any university library should have it, though. It's considered a classic.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Metropolis: seeing the complete classic film

This week I went to my favorite arthouse cinema, RagTag in Columbia, Missouri, to see the restored, full-length version of Metropolis.

You've probably seen Fritz Lang's 1927 Expressionist masterpiece, and you've certainly seen some of its most famous images: a robot turning into a beautiful woman, slave workers turning the giant hands of a man-sized clock, immense machinery exploding and killing the crew. It's visually stunning and memorable, but until now it wasn't complete.

The original ran 153 minutes, too much even for the longer attention spans of a more patient age. At least half an hour was cut from most versions, and more in some cases. This left the film jumpy and at times incoherent. The extra film was considered lost until a few years ago when an original, full-length copy was found in Argentina.

The film was in bad shape and transferred to 16mm, so it had lost its original dimensions. With painstaking care, experts fixed up most of the missing parts and this almost complete version of the film is now on international tour. I say "almost complete" because a few minutes were too mangled to be restored. Even the parts that were restored are grainy and scratched. Missing scenes are explained with intertitles.

Go see it anyway. The complex and compelling plot now makes sense for the first time, and even the scratchy bits contain some alluring scenes. Lang was a master, one of the greatest directors of all time, and the Expressionist movement of the Weimar Republic created some of the most enduring silent classics in history. Seeing it actually upped my productivity as a writer. As I've mentioned before, I'm more inspired by artists in other fields than I am by writers. Seeing great DJs or painters, or even ancient ruins, gets my creative juices flowing.


[Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons]