Machine Gunner's Creed, Ukraine to Karachi 1918-1923
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Description
For some war is an inspiring, uplifting, and a liberating
occurrence. Such is the case of Emil
Dorfmeister. Abandon without a name to
the St. Katherine Order in Posen, Dorfmeister received an excellent education
but, because he was an orphan, no employment opportunities. He left the sisters' care at an early age to
wander from one job to the next picking up experiences and, when working in the
coal mines of Silesia, Russian as a second language. When the Great War started, he volunteered
and fought for three years in the trenches of France gaining a new talent as a
machine gun sharpshooter. But his real
asset was in knowing Russian. He was
culled from a pillbox crew and sent to Ukraine as part of an occupation force
which had transcended its original purpose as a restorer of the Ukrainian
government to a pillaging horde that indiscriminately seized Ukrainian food to
ship back to Germany. Into his life came
Tatianna Brendt, the daughter of German parents living along the Volga. Before the Revolution, Brendt had received an
education at the Women's Institute in Kiev and found work with a legal firm in Kharkov. The Revolution destroyed the Tsarist legal
system putting her out of a job but Brendt took an active part in furthering
women's rights in the Bolshevik party.
She was zealous and soon drew the envy and ridicule of those who were
not comfortable with a woman having so much influence. She was forced out of her apartment due to
rumors of promiscuous behaviors, fired from her job as an influencer, and
relegated to living on the Kharkov streets with only the clothes on her back in
February. Then an opportunity came her
way. Because she could read and write
Russian and German, the new secret police, the CHEKA, recruited her to spy for
them in Ukraine. She was dressed up and
left to find someone she could attach herself to among the German occupation
force. She found that someone in Emil
Dorfmeister.
Warm,
well-clothed, well fed, and safe, Brendt began her spying career with the help
of Dorfmeister who had become fed-up with the ruthlessness of his superiors in
looting Ukrainian resources. It soon
came to pass that efforts to collect grain and other food supplies in his area
of administration to send back to Germany came to naught and armed resistance
to collection caravans increased. Before
Dorfmeister's superiors could launch an investigation, the war ended and the
Germans were forced to evacuate Ukraine.
Dorfmeister's last acts as an administrator were to send Brendt north
while he boarded a train to Germany.
Brendt succeeded in gaining Bolshevik Russia but the part of the train
that Dorfmeister was in was blown up by inept Bolshevik partisans. The train, relatively unharmed, continued its
journey leaving Dorfmeister behind to either walk out of Russia or join the
partisans to stay alive. He chose to use
his skill as a machine gunner with the partisans. Brendt went on to spy on Leon Trotsky and the
antirevolutionary General Wrangel for the CHEKA. Dorfmeister, in his turn, joined Wrangel's
army after being captured and given a choice of join or be executed.
Brendt and
Dorfmeister came within a hair's breathe of meeting again and again. Brendt secretly contributed to Dorfmeister's
recovery from wounds in Simferopol and nearly came to a reunion in
Constantinople after the evacuation of Wrangel's army from the Crimea. Dorfmeister was never aware of who his
benefactor was and as a result fled Constantinople to take a job of training
the pan-Moslem army of Enver Pasha in Turkestan.
The final acts of
the story play out in Afghanistan and the new kingdom of Yugoslavia. Both paths are tainted by the past.
About the Author
Michael P. Kihntopf is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and retired high school world history and special education teacher. He holds a B.A. in history from Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas. He is the author of Victory in the East, the Rise and Fall of the Imperial German Army (2000), Handcuffed to a Corpse, German Intervention in the Balkans, 1914-1917 (2002), The Scent of Roses in Winter (2010), A Day with the Old Folks, Verdun 1916 (2015), Wars Without End, Battles Without Winners, France to Petrograd March 1918-December 1920 (2017), and A Remote Army Post in the Desert, Petrograd to Shanghai, November 1919 – January 1922. The first two works dealt with a German perspective of the World War 1 Eastern Front. The rest are adventure novels with a central theme of individual experience at war and in the turmoil that followed World War 1. He has written over 20 articles about World War 1 for such magazines as Strategies and Tactics, Military History, Command, and Relevance and reviewed books for The Journal of Military History. He is also the chairperson for the Southwest Branch of the World War I Historical Association, an organization affiliated with the Western Front Association which has chapters worldwide.
