At that moment, something awful took place . . . it was almost like a sign from God that we were doing wrong. A strange, circular wind blew up on the dunes, some kind of small tornado, and it whirled around and it fanned the fires from the burning Sherman and the burning PAK . . . there was chaos all around me in this whirlwind. Ammunition was exploding, men were screaming, both German and American and in Russian too. All the time, the planes were racing over us through the smoke, firing their cannons inland. It was absolute hell on that sand. Absolute hell.
