All Hell Let Loose (54 page)

On 16 December the river froze, and the ice quickly became thick enough to bear trucks and guns. In the ruins of Stalingrad, fighting ebbed – the critical battles were now taking place south and westwards. Five days later, Soviet tanks completed a perfect double envelopment behind Paulus’s Sixth Army: Zhukov’s spearheads met east of the Don crossing at Kalach. Many times in the course of the war the Russians achieved such encirclements. Many times also, the Germans broke out of them. What was different here was that Hitler rejected the pleas of Sixth Army’s commander for such a retreat. Paulus was ordered to continue his assault on Stalingrad, while Manstein began an attack from the west, to restore contact with Sixth Army. By the 23rd, his spearheads had battered a passage to within thirty miles of Stalingrad. Then they stuck. The field marshal urged Paulus to defy Hitler and break out to join him, as was still feasible. He refused, condemning 200,000 men to death or captivity. Manstein’s forces were spent, and he ordered a general retreat.

Along the entire German front in the east, the approach of Christmas prompted a surge of sentimentality. Every Sunday afternoon, most men within reach of a radio listened to the request programme
Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht
, broadcast from Berlin to provide a link between soldiers and families at home. Relentlessly patriotic, it highlighted such numbers as ‘
Glocken der Heimat
’ (‘Bells of the Homeland’) and ‘
Panzer rollen in Afrika vor
’ (‘Panzers Roll in Africa’). Soldiers loved to hear Zarah Leander sing ‘
Ich weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n
’, a special favourite of German civilians: ‘I know, one day a miracle will happen/And then a thousand fairy tales will come true/I know that a love cannot die/That is so great and wonderful.’

Many Germans, especially the young, were gripped by a paranoia no less real for being rooted in Nazi fantasies. Luftwaffe pilot Heinz Knoke succumbed to emotion on Christmas Eve, listening to ‘
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
’ – ‘Silent Night’: ‘This is the most beautiful of all German carols. Even the British, the French and the Americans are singing it tonight. Do they know that it is a German song? And do they fully appreciate its true significance? Why do people all over the world hate us Germans, and yet still sing German songs, play music by such German composers as Beethoven and Bach, and recite the works of the great German poets? Why?’ Paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote in the same spirit from Russia:

The sentiments of these young men, cogs in a war machine that had wreaked untold misery, reflected the triumph of Goebbels’ educational and propaganda machine, and the tragedy of Europe to which it contributed so much. That Christmas of 1942 in Russia, millions of German soldiers approached a rendezvous with the collapse of their leader’s insane ambitions that would hasten many to their graves.

Goering professed the Luftwaffe’s ability to supply the German forces isolated in the Stalingrad pocket – though the most rudimentary calculation showed that such airlift capacity was lacking. Through December, as ammunition and rations dwindled, Paulus’s men lost ground, men, tanks, and soon hope. On 16 January 1943, a Wehrmacht officer at Stalingrad wrote in a valedictory letter to his wife: ‘The implacable struggle continues. God helps the brave! Whatever Providence may ordain, we ask for one thing, for strength to hold on! Let it be said of us one day that the German army fought at Stalingrad as soldiers never before in the world have fought. To pass this spirit on to our children is the task of mothers.’ To most of those trapped in Paulus’s pocket, however, such heroic sentiments represented flatulence.

On 12 January, four Russian
fronts
struck at Army Group Don, north of Stalingrad, driving back the Axis forces in disarray. The Pasubio Division, part of the Italian Eighth Army in the Don pocket, found itself struggling westwards. Without fuel, the hapless troops were obliged to ditch heavy weapons and take to their feet. ‘Vehicles complete with loads were being abandoned along the road,’ wrote artillery Lieutenant Eugenio Corti. ‘It broke my heart to see them. How much effort and expense that equipment must have cost Italy!’ If exhausted men sought to snatch rides on German vehicles, they were thrown off with yells and curses.

Corti made ineffectual efforts to preserve discipline in his unit. ‘But how can you expect people who are unused to being well-ordered in normal civilian life to become orderly … simply because they find themselves in uniform? As enemy fire rained down, the rabble quickened its stumbling pace. I now witnessed one of the most wretched scenes of the whole retreat: Italians killing Italians … We had ceased to be an army; I was no longer with soldiers but with creatures incapable of controlling themselves, obedient to a single animal instinct: self-preservation.’ He cursed his own softness, in failing to shoot a man who defied orders that only the wounded should ride on the few sledges. ‘Countless instances of weakness like mine accounted for the confusion in which we found ourselves … A German soldier in our midst was beside himself with contempt. I had to admit he was right … we were dealing with undisciplined, bewildered men.’

At a dressing station, ‘the wounded were lying atop one another. When one of the few orderlies tending them appeared with a little water, to the groaning was added the cries of those he inadvertently trod upon. Outside, straw had been laid on the snow, on which several hundred men were lying … it must have been –15 or –20 degrees. The dead lay mingled with the wounded. One doctor did the rounds: he himself had been twice wounded by shell splinters while performing amputations with a cutthroat razor.’

Whichever of the warring armies held the ascendant, Russian sufferings persisted. In a peasant hut, Corti came upon a stricken family. ‘I was greeted by the corpse of a gigantic old man with a long whiteish beard lying in a pool of blood … Cowering against a wall, terror-stricken, were three or four women and five or six children – Russians, thin, delicate, waxen-faced. A soldier was calmly eating cooked potatoes … How warm it was in that house! I urged the women and children to do their eating before more soldiers arrived and gobbled the lot.’ Axis troops were often bemused and impressed by the stoicism of the Russians, who seemed to them victims of communism rather than enemies. Even after the alien invaders had brought untold misery upon their country, simple country-folk sometimes displayed a human sympathy for afflicted and suffering Axis soldiers which moved them. Corti wrote: ‘During halts on those marches many of our compatriots were rescued from frostbite by the selfless, maternal care of poor women.’

Throughout that terrible retreat, Hitler’s allies cursed the Luftwaffe, which dropped supplies only to German units. Corti wrote: ‘We watched those aircraft avidly: we found their form and colour repugnant and alien, like the uniforms of German soldiers … If only the familiar outline of some Italian plane had come into sight! If only the slightest thing had been dropped for us, but nothing came!’ Italians’ misery was compounded by censorship at home which kept their families in ignorance of those perishing in the snow: ‘Back in the distant
patria
nobody knew of their sacrifice. We of the army in Russia lived out our tragedy while the radio and newspapers went on about other things altogether. It was as if the entire nation had forgotten us.’

Corti recoiled from the spectacle of Germans massacring Russian prisoners, though he knew that the Red Army often did likewise to its own captives. ‘It was extremely painful – for we were civilised men – to be caught up in that savage clash between barbarians.’ He was torn between disgust at the Germans’ ruthlessness, ‘which at times disqualified them in my eyes from membership of the human family’, and grudging respect for their strength of will. He deplored their contempt for other races. He heard of their officers shooting men too badly wounded to move, of rapes and murders, of sledges loaded with Italian wounded hijacked by the Wehrmacht. But he was also awed by the manner in which German soldiers instinctively performed their duties, even without an officer or NCO to give orders. ‘I … asked myself … what would have become of us without the Germans. I was reluctantly forced to admit that alone, we Italians would have ended up in enemy hands … I … thanked heaven that they were with us there in the column … Without a shadow of a doubt, as soldiers they have no equal.’

Again and again, German tanks and Stukas drove back pursuing Russian armour, enabling the retreating columns to struggle on, amid murderous Soviet mortaring. One Italian soldier’s testicles were sliced away by a shell splinter. Thrusting them in his pocket, the man bound the wound with string and trudged onward. Next day at a dressing station, he lowered his trousers; fumbling in his pocket, according to Eugenio Corti’s account, he proffered to a doctor ‘in the palm of his hand the blackish testicles mixed with biscuit crumbs, asking whether they could be sewn back on’. Corti survived to reach the railhead at Yasinovataya, and thence travelled through Poland to Germany. A hospital train at last bore him home to his beloved Italy. At the end of 1942 an Italian general asserted that 99 per cent of his fellow countrymen not merely expected to lose the war, but now fervently hoped to do so as swiftly as possible.

In January 1943, the German line in the east suffered a succession of crippling blows. On the 12th, in the far north, the Russians launched an attack which, at the end of five days’ fighting, opened a corridor along the shore of Lake Ladoga that broke the siege of Leningrad. A simultaneous assault further south recaptured Voronezh and wrecked the Hungarian formations of Hitler’s armies. In late January, Soviet forces closed on Rostov, threatening German forces in the Caucasus, which were soon confined to a bridgehead at Taman, just east of the Crimea. On 31 January, Paulus surrendered the remains of Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Zhukov became the first wartime Soviet commander to receive a marshal’s baton, soon joined by Vasilevsky and Stalin himself. On 8 February the Russians entered Kursk, and a week later Rostov; they took Kharkov on the 16th.

Stalingrad transformed the morale of the Red Army. A soldier named Ageev wrote home: ‘I’m in an exceptional mood. If you only knew, then you’d be just as happy as I am. Imagine it – the Fritzes are running away from us!’ Vasily Grossman was disgusted by what he perceived as the gross egoism of Chuikov and other commanders, vying with each other to claim credit for the Red Army’s victories: ‘There’s no modesty. “I did it, I, I, I, I, I …” They speak about other commanders without any respect, recounting some ridiculous gossip.’ But, after the horrors and failures of the previous year, who could grudge Stalin’s generals their outburst of triumphalism? The struggle for Stalingrad had cost 155,000 Russian dead, many of them consigned to unmarked graves because superstition made
frontoviks
, as Russians termed fighting soldiers, reluctant to wear identity capsules, the Red Army’s equivalent of dog tags. A further 320,000 men were evacuated sick or wounded. But this butcher’s bill seemed acceptable as the price of a victory that changed the course of the war.

The Allied world rejoiced alongside Stalin’s people. ‘The killing of thousands of Germans in Russia makes pleasant reading now,’ wrote British civilian Herbert Brush on 26 November 1942, ‘and I hope it will be kept up for a long time yet. It is the only way to convert young Germans. I wonder how the Russians will treat the prisoners they capture … it will show whether the Russians are really converted to civilised life.’ The answer to Brush’s speculation was that many German prisoners were killed or allowed to starve or freeze, because the contest in barbarism had become unstoppable.

The Red Army achieved stunning advances in the first months of 1943, gaining up to 150 miles in the north, to halt beyond Kursk. Soviet generalship sometimes displayed brilliance, but mass remained the key element in the Red Army’s successes. Discipline was erratic, and units were vulnerable to outbreaks of panic and desertion. Command incompetence was often compounded by drunkenness. Captain Nikolai Belov recorded scenes during an attack that were not untypical: