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.

Book Review: Hitler's Home Guard: Volkssturmmann: Western Front, 1944-45

Hitler's Home Guard: Volkssturmmann: Western Front, 1944-45 by David Yelton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I have written seven books for Osprey Publishing so I can't really be called an unbiased reviewer. On the other hand, I don't know the author or artist and WW2 is a bit out of my specialty. I read this as research for a novel I'm writing.
This is a look at a little-covered aspect of the war, Germany's desperate formation of a militia to supplement the exhausted and depleted Wehrmacht. These teenagers, old men, and men taken from essential services were given little training, insufficient weapons, and were sent against the full force of the Allied assaults in late 1944 and early 1945. No prizes for figuring out what happened.
The author goes through the formation of the Volkssturm, and how individuals were recruited and trained, using a fictional character in a real unit as an example. Other reviewers have criticized using a fictional character, but given the paucity of sources for the Volkssturm I didn't see this as a problem. One limitation, however, is that it only covers the Western Front. The author notes that the Volkssturm on the Eastern Front were better armed and motivated, and I was hoping that a second book would be written about their story. Since it's been 10 years since this book's publication I guess that's not going to happen.
Another missed opportunity is that the Volksgewehr, a series of cheap gun designs introduced late in the war, are not really described. There isn't much written on these guns and it would have been appropriate to add something here.
Despite these shortcomings, I found this book a gripping read. It goes into detail about the civilian experience and the terror these half-soldiers must have felt when a helmet was plunked on their head, a rifle thrust into their hands, and they were sent against thundering columns of tanks. A large section is dedicated to the process of surrendering, internment, and repatriation. That was the main war experience for a lot of these guys!
All in all, a good overview of a little-known aspect of the war.

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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.