310th Regiment

The 310th Regiment is an infantry regiment within the German 79th Light Infantry Division, and the unit in which Hans Reiter serves during the Second World War. Its role in the novel is conveyed through his passage from initial service in Poland to later fighting around Chornomorske and Sevastopol: the regiment supplies the organized military framework, while Reiter’s survival and perceptions complicate the expected story of a soldier at war.

Formation and Command

In 1939, after Hans Reiter was drafted and completed several months of training, he was assigned to the 310th, a light infantry regiment based about twenty miles from the Polish border. The 310th served alongside the 311th and 312th regiments in the 79th Light Infantry Division. At the time, the division was commanded by General Kruger and belonged to the 10th Infantry Corps, commanded by General Von Bohle. Colonel Von Berenberg commanded the 310th, which was organized into three battalions.

Reiter belonged first to the 3rd Battalion, where he served as an assistant machine-gun operator, and then to an assault company. This progression places him within the regiment’s combat structure rather than at a distance from its operations. His later exposure to frontline attacks grows out of this assignment and the regiment’s movement between theaters.

First Combat near Kutno

Reiter’s first actual battle took place on the outskirts of Kutno. The Polish forces were few and poorly armed, but initially showed no sign of surrender; the encounter was brief, and the account later clarifies that they wanted to give up but did not know how. Reiter’s assault group attacked a farm and a forest where the remaining Polish artillery had concentrated.

Captain Gercke watched the group depart and expected Reiter to be killed. Because Reiter was exceptionally tall, Gercke imagined that he would be an easy target, comparing his departure to a giraffe going among predators. The comparison makes Reiter’s conspicuous body seem, at first, like a liability in battle.

The attack left two German soldiers dead and five wounded at the farm; at the forest, another German soldier was killed and three were wounded. Reiter emerged unharmed. That night, the group’s sergeant reported that Reiter had somehow frightened the opposing soldiers rather than simply drawing their fire. Gercke wondered whether Reiter had been transformed in combat, but the account offers these explanations as speculation, not as a settled account of how he behaved. His survival remains the concrete fact around which the regiment’s first battle becomes an early portrait of him.

The 79th Division continued fighting outside Kutno, but Reiter did not take part in another skirmish there. Before September ended, the division was transferred by train to the western border to join the rest of the 10th Infantry Corps. This movement carries the regiment’s story onward without turning its early encounter into a continuous account of Reiter’s combat experience.

Campaigns around Chornomorske

Later, the 310th took part in the battle for Chornomorske, where Reiter’s battalion played an important role. Reiter risked his life at least three times during this sequence. The first danger arose during an attack on a brick fortification near Kirovske, at the junction of Chernishove, Kirovske, and Chornomorske. The account emphasizes that the fortification was so slight it would not have withstood an artillery volley; Reiter was nevertheless deeply affected by its apparent poverty and innocence, as though it had been built and defended by children.

The second near-fatal episode came during the capture of Chornomorske. The 79th Division’s two main regiments led the attack after the division’s artillery had been concentrated near the piers, at the beginning of the road connecting Chornomorske with Evpatoria, Frunze, Inkerman, and Sevastopol. The first assault failed, and Reiter’s battalion, held in reserve, advanced in the second wave. As the soldiers crossed barbed wire, German artillery redirected its fire against Soviet machine-gun positions. Reiter began to sweat and believed he would die; the sea’s nearness reinforced that conviction. The passage makes the regiment’s coordinated movement visible while keeping the moment of danger close to Reiter’s individual experience.

Sevastopol and Narrative Significance

Weeks later, Reiter faced a third near-death experience during the attack on Sevastopol. The German advance was driven back, and attempts to establish defensive lines were met with heavy artillery fire. Outside the city, near the Russian trenches, German and Romanian dead lay in heaps. Fighting repeatedly became close-quarters, including a brief clash in a trench occupied by Russian sailors, followed by the arrival of more sailors and a renewed battle. Reiter experienced their presence as charged with both danger and portent, imagining that one of them would kill him and send him back into the depths of a sea.

Across these episodes, the 310th Regiment is defined not only by its place in a division and its successive movements, but by the uneven relationship between military action and Reiter’s private apprehension. He survives the attack near Kutno despite Gercke’s expectation, then repeatedly comes close to death in the fighting around Chornomorske and Sevastopol. The regiment’s campaign history therefore becomes the structure through which the narrative tests the image of Reiter as a conspicuous, apparently vulnerable soldier—and returns to the sea as a recurring figure in his sense of mortality.