Log 4

    In the past two weeks, I had read the next few chapters about Otto's early life in his service. These readings were quite satisfying for me, as a WWII history lover and a tank fan. Many famous history incidents can be recognized immediately after Otto mentioned the time, place or situation. For example, Otto joined the war in 1941 and was sent to the east invading Russia, so it must be the famous Operation Barbarossa, which failed eventually because of Russia's brave and stubborn resistance in their capital: Mosco. Otto also mentioned how his first tank: the Czech 38(t) became uncompetitive in the rapid development of the arms race. And it was even worse after Russian deployed the famous engineering masterpiece: the T-34 tanks into the battlefield. The 38(t) once gave Otto infinite confidence but now standed not a single chance against the almighty T-34 tanks. This was such a dramatic twist in the history and Otto’s memory. Besides these historical documentaries, I was also really looking forward to reading about how Otto was involved in these battles and his achievements.

    These few chapters continued the previous description of Otto and his comrade’s emotion. During their military training, Otto kept being excited and looking forward to their first battle. They can’t wait to meet their enemy and have their first kill. They even kept discussing who would be their opponent in their first mission, would it be British or American? An interesting phenomenon was that Otto started having some other emotion beside his pure excitement. In his first deployment, that was in 1941, on the East Front, fighting against Russian. The whole tank crew members were stuck in a weird and contradictory emotion, especially for Otto. As mentioned before, Otto was a loader in a tank. Compared to other positions, the only thing he needed to do was loading the ammunition into the chamber of maingun. So it’s obvious that a loader didn’t need and didn't have any observation devices to look around. Because of this, Otto could only stay in this metal box blindly. The only way for him to get the information is the description from his commander or the news on the radio. No wonder people always said that a tank was a deadly “metal coffin” for the tankers. Imagining you were locked in a small space without fresh air and light, also, you need to keep highly focused for hours and death would knock on your door at any time. To be honest, I won’t last for an hour if it would be me in there. In such a crazy situation with high pressure, Otto’s mood kept switching between fear and expectancy. Whenever they were checking a barn or a house, they couldn’t wait to see their first “Ivan” show up, but they were also afraid that their tank would get hit first.

    The description for Otto in these chapters became much more complicated. The working environment for tankers was totally inhuman, and Otto described their invasion as just like “Rushing for a train schedule”. They didn’t have a moment to stop, to take a deep breath, they just kept marching forward. Moving from place to place, there was no actual battle happening to them and they started to feel empty. When I was reading I also felt suffocation and anxiety from Otto’s words. And all this oppression got finally released until Otto's first journey came to its ending: They got hit. Once Otto started to get used to this temple, death knocked on their door. He described it as greased lighting, the impact, scream and explosion happened all of a sudden. They bailed out from the tank like a headless chicken, all they could do was curse how effective the Russain’s anti-tank gun was and how outdated the 38(t) was. This ending was quite surprising to me because compared to Otto's high reputation, he actually had a pretty bad beginning in his career. After he left the frontline and turned back to the rear, he even failed the advance officer course. Now I became extremely curious about how this man became the most successful tank commander during WWII? I can’t wait to discover it in the later half of the book.