Hooge

[bob lembke]

2 hours ago, MBrockway said:

Bob,

Was your father at the Hooge attack on 30 Jul 1915?  I'm a bit confused on the sequence of events in his military history.

Cheers,

Mark

 

 

When the war started my father was in a Royal institute for construction engineering, preparing to become a Festungsbau=Officier 

("Fortifications Construction Officer"), a technical officer class like the Explosives Officer that my grand-father was. The latter had

seen the results of the bayonet charges in Belgium and Russia and desperately wanted his only son, who was impetuous and

headstrong, to not join the infantry, but enter the Pioniere, where, as he wrote in a letter, "you can learn something useful". There

followed almost a year of fascinating correspondence, in which father and son were trying to navigate the many routes to the

unavoidable eventual army induction to end up with the most desirable duty. My grandfather wanted his son to volunteer with the 

3. Pionier=Bataillon, and then somehow translate to the 3. Reserve=Pionier=Bataillon in Russia, the engineer unit attached to the

reserve army corps in Russia where my grand father was in the Generalkommando or army corps staff. Of the officers in the

pioneer unit in Russia, my grandfather wrote: "I know all of the officers in that unit, and have trained many of them."

 

In short, my father was in the process of being inducted and starting training with a Pionier=Bataillon inn Germany when the Hooge 

attack occurred. The term Pionier in the German army I think is very different than the term pioneer in the British Army, they were

highly skilled, with many special technical duties, such as field-testing new models of light infantry support artillery pieces. The famous

Storm Battalion Rohr was a Pionier unit set up to test a new model of light field gun for direct fire support, it morphed into the first

classic storm battalion, with its own direct fire battery, that my father observed in action and described as a wonder on the battlefield.

 

When the Allies evacuated Gallipoli (wisely, the Germans and Turks were planning very bad things for the Allies in the Spring), my

father was sent to Croatia to build a small sub base, and also in that period recover from the malaria he had contracted in Turkey.

Then in mid-1916 he volunteered for a transfer to the flame regiment of the Prussian Guard, also a Pionier unit, in keeping with their

traditional role in field-testing new-concept equipment. He then joined a flame thrower company at Verdun, promptly getting wounded 

there twice.

 

My father was wounded four times during flame attacks, but all four had nothing to do with the idea of the attacking infantry putting up

a stout defensive fire and halting the flame attack, as has been posited lately, but just odd battlefield accidents. In one case, at Verdun,

in a pre-dawn raid on the famous Hill 304, after blowing up several batteries of French 75s, and escorting back 150 prisoners,

he tried to save the life of a sleepy French officer emerging from his dugout, pistol in hand; he spoke to him in his excellent French,

saying: "Give me your pistol, for you the was is over.", and the stupid man instead shot my father in the hand from a distance

 

of inches, which was very painful, according to my father, due to the muzzle blast, which left a bad burn on his hand,

so badly as the burn hid the entry wound. In a second or two my father's sergeant bisected the French officer's head,

helmet and all, with his "razor-sharp" spade, which was the close combat weapon of choice for the flame pioneers; 

they carried no rifles with bayonets, feeling that they were too long and awkward for fighting in trenches. Each man

also had a P 08 "Luger". A few NCOs carried a carbine. All the men had crew-served weapons or were specialized

grenadiers. No riflemen at all. But French light machine guns that could be fired from the walk, from the waist. 

 

Long answer to a short question, but hopefully interesting.

Edited 20 March , 2017 by bob lembke
editing