In the Battle of Kharkov, March 1943, this happened to Arno Greif

Out of the news... and into history and myth.



We read in the news today of the Battle of Kharkov (Charkiv).

In the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war they are fighting in the city of Kharkov.

For the moment I have nothing more to say of this, the current war and its events.

I only come to think of this: that there was a Battle of Kharkov in 1943 also.

This is historical.

And further, I tell about this "Kharkov 1943" event in my novel Burning Magnesium (2018).

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The novel starts with the hero fighting in Stalingrad. That went well... not. At least not for the German 6th Army. It had to capitulate there in February 1943. However, before the final defeat the hero of the novel, private Arno Greif, is ordered out of the Kessel and off to Kharkov, way out northwest of Stalingrad.

And that's not the end of action; now the Germans have to retreat from Kharkov. This is an epic in itself.

However, by this time German panzer general Manstein planned a counterstrike... and, eventuelly, the Russian spring offensive was halted... and Kharkov could be retaken.

So how does this read in the novel?

I can't summarize all of the above. But in Chapter Four there actually is a kind of summary. We read:

... the Russians had encircled Stalingrad, then they had obliterated and eradicated the huge pocket of trapped men. This is was in January 1943. The broken remnants of the German 6th Army, 91,000 men, trudged off in endless, freezing columns to the prison camps.

Very succint, eh...? Very epic, eh...?

That, at least, is the aim of this very work... to be an epic war novel.

Further we read in Chapter Four:

As we have seen, February 1943 continued with a Russian offensive in Ukraine. It went well and the Red Army advanced many miles. Kharkov was retaken and it was there that Arno’s unit ... had to break out of an encirclement. But then the Germans, with Manstein in the forefront, launched a counterstrike. The timing was perfect.

Just as Vatutin’s columns had stretched themselves too far and begun to spread out, Manstein threw his reinforcements into the fray and the Russian advance was halted in late February and early March. Once again, everything was turned around. Soon Manstein’s forces were advancing; Kharkov and Belgorod were retaken. The main job was done by the 2nd SS Panzer Corps. The 50th Regiment, to which Arno belonged, supported the renewed offensive, coming to the front by rail. -- It was dramatic. As advance company to an advance battalion, Arno’s unit arrived in Kharkov on March 10, just as the SS armour reached the suburbs.

Arno and his comrades disembarked and dashed straight into position outside the railway station, blasting MG fire down the streets. Then they advanced into the devastated city, driving out the Soviets and finally establishing contact with the panzers. They celebrated victory in the joyful springtime.

But this is just the preamble to the episode I was going to relate in this post. The story of what happened to Arno Greif in the Battle of Kharkov proper, March 1943, 79 years ago today...

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Thus, in Chapter Four of Burning Magnesium, we read that during the Battle of Kharkov in March...

... a remarkable thing happened. They fought over a park. The Russians retreated from it. The park was a chaos of armour, debris and fallen trees. Leading his rifle squad forward, Arno was hit by a 7.62 mm bullet.

An enemy had got him in his sights and shot him. Arno was hit on the side of the chest. He was knocked to the muddy ground. But the bullet was stopped by a remarkable combination of things that he was carrying: a rifle sling, the shoulder strap to his Sturmgepäck and a wallet with a lot of coins. He was hit but he survived, only getting a vivid bruise on the chest where he had been struck.

Very dramatic...! -- And further:

After a first aider had checked that Arno was unhurt, he was able to continue to lead his squad in combat. He pondered the meaning of what had happened. He realised that it was a close shave. The bullet could easily have killed him. But he survived. He wouldn’t die in this war, this he now realised. It was such an insight that soldiers sometimes get.

He wouldn’t die. This realization disappointed him a tad. Because, to die in battle, this was surely the highlight of a warrior’s life, wasn’t it...? Few soldiers admitted it openly – but unspoken, this was a feeling many elite soldiers nourished.

Knowing that they would do their utmost and then fall, in the midst of the most intense battle: O höchste Lust, O Seeligkeit...! By contrast, to fight, to live to see the peace and then go home just to fade away – this was nothing in comparison. It was like an insult.

He wouldn’t die. But the eureka moment didn’t tell him whether he would completely avoid getting hurt. He felt invulnerable a after this encounter with death, but how do you go through a war without even being wounded...?

This he wondered. But he reached equilibrium later that day, the day when he was shot and survived unscathed. Resting with the squad in a backyard, waiting for orders, Arno looked up at the overcast sky, so dark it was almost purple, and said to himself: I Am. It was the same mantra he had utilised in his pre-war existence and the one he had said before going into the combat zone in 1942. This saying always brought clarity; it always brought peace of mind: I Am.

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And that's it... there you have it... What I want to say is: the above is an excerpt that, hopefully, throws some light on this novel as a whole. A novel about a war playing in an area where, today, another war is fought.

Overall my novel tells about Arno Greif's exploits on the Eastern Fron from 1942 to 1945, in the process capturing events from Western Ukraine 1943, the Kamenets-Podolsky breakout, Warsaw 1944, and Berlin 1945. One reviewer said: "For the reader wishing for a war novel that deviates from the moralizing, pacifist pattern, Jünger’s Storm of Steel has long been the obvious alternative. With his work, Burning Magnesium, Lennart Svensson has given us yet another alternative."



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