The Schirmer Inheritance

The German forces which withdrew from Greece in October 1944 were very different in both numbers and quality from the field army which had invaded the country just over three years earlier. If the Twelfth Army of General von List, with its crack panzer divisions and its record of success in the Polish campaign, had epitomized the irresistible strength of the Wehrmacht, the occupation forces, setting out to make their way home while there was still a road home left open to them, epitomized no less strikingly the Wehrmacht’s ultimate exhaustion. The earlier practice of resting troops from the fighting fronts by giving them tours of occupation duty had long been abandoned as a luxury. The Lines of Communication Division which garrisoned the Salonika area in 1944 was, for the most part, made up of men who, for one reason or another, were considered unfit for combatant duty: debilitated survivors from the Russian front, the older men, the weaklings, and those who, because of either wounds or sickness, were of low medical categories.

For Sergeant Schirmer, the war had ended on that day in Italy when he had obeyed the order of an inexperienced officer to make a parachute jump over a wood. The comradeship of fighting men in a corps d’elite has meant a great deal to a great many men. To Sergeant Schirmer it had given something that his upbringing had always denied him-his belief in himself as a man. The months in the hospital which had followed the accident, the court of inquiry, the rehabilitation centre, the medical examinations, and the posting to Greece had been a bitter epilogue to the only period of his life in which he felt he had known happiness. Many times he had wished that the tree branch which had merely broken his hip had pierced his breast and killed him.

If the Ninety-fourth Garrison Regiment at Salonika had been the kind of unit in which a soldier like Sergeant Schirmer could have come to take even a grudging pride, many things no doubt would have been very different. But it was not a unit in which any self-respecting man could have taken pride. The officers (with a few exceptions such as Lieutenant Leubner) were the army’s unemployables, the kind of officers whom unit commanders hasten to get rid of when they have the chance and who spend most of their service lives held on depot establishments awaiting postings. The N.C.O.’s (again with a few exceptions) were incompetent and corrupt. The rank and file were a disgruntled and decrepit assembly of old soldiers, chronic invalids, dullards, and petty delinquents. Almost the first order which the Sergeant had received from an officer on joining had been an order to remove his paratrooper’s badge. That had been his introduction to the regiment, and as time went by, he had learned to fortify and console himself with his contempt for it.

The German withdrawal from Thrace was an ignominious affair. The depot soldiers responsible for the staff work had had little experience of moving troops in the field and still less of supplying them while they were on the move. Units like the Ninety-fourth Garrison Regiment, and there was more than one, could do little to make good the deficiencies. The knowledge that British raiding forces were advancing rapidly from the south in order to harass the retreat, and that andarte bands were already hovering aggressively on the flanks, may have lent urgency to the withdrawal, but, in doing so, it had also added to the confusion. It was traffic congestion rather than any brilliant planning by Phengaros that led to the ambushing of Sergeant Schirmer’s convoy.

He was one of the last of his regiment to leave the Salonika area. Contempt for his regiment he might have, but that did not prevent his doing his utmost to see that the fraction of it that he controlled carried out its orders properly. As headquarters weapons-instructor, he had no platoon responsibilities and came under the command of an engineer officer in charge of a special rear-guard party. This officer was Lieutenant Leubner, and he had been detailed to carry out a series of important demolitions in the wake of the retreat.

The Sergeant liked Lieutenant Leubner, who had lost a hand in Italy; he felt that the Lieutenant understood him. Between them they organized the party in two detachments, and the Sergeant was given command of one of them.

He drove his men and himself unmercifully and succeeded in completing his part of the work in accordance with the time-table issued with the movement order. During the night of the 23rd of October his detachment loaded the trucks they were to take with them and moved out of Salonika. They were exactly on schedule.