The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  Another heavy snow began to fall and it slashed the faces of the bearded soldiers and froze on their eyebrows and chins. His head tucked in like a turtle, Bracci walked on toward a village sitting precariously on the crest of a hill. He hoped the Russians would stop there to feed their captives, none of whom had eaten in at least forty-eight hours.

  At dusk the Russians did halt the column, and Bracci crawled into a stable to find a place to sleep. Across the room several Italians smashed their countrymen aside in order to lie in a feeding trough filled with fresh hay.

  Other remnants of the Italian Army were trying to escape through a valley near the town of Abrusovka thirty miles to the west. But on the surrounding slopes, Russian gunners had installed the awesome Katusha rockets, which whooshed thousands of rounds of high explosives into the writhing gray masses on the valley floor.

  A small German detachment trapped at one end of the cul-de-sac managed somehow to commandeer several trucks and enough fuel to make a run through the gauntlet. A few Italian soldiers attempted to jump on the running boards, but the Germans shot them. Other Italians who clung desperately to door handles had their fingers smashed by rifle butts. Having driven their allies back, the frantic Germans pulled away and disappeared in a southerly direction.

  Dr. Cristoforo Capone had been running for several days. When he came to the valley, he saw mobs of Italians rushing back and forth at the bottom of the deep gorge. Behind Capone, a Russian tank fired into the crowd, and an officer beside him suddenly gurgled as a rifle bullet went through his neck.

  Capone broke away but had no place to hide as machine guns and artillery raked the valley floor. Soldiers toppled, blew into fragments, or stood resignedly, awaiting the impact of a bullet. Some officers and men raised their hands in surrender. Others refused. A surgeon Capone recognized, screamed: “They’re going to kill all of us!” and ran at a Russian machine gun that cut him to pieces. For a fleeting moment, Capone thought of doing the same thing, but to his right, another group of Italians suddenly put up their hands. He joined them, and while he watched the enemy approach, several officers in the line changed their minds, pulled out pistols and shot themselves.

  Another tense conversation had started between Erich von Man-stein and Friedrich von Paulus on the impersonal keys of the teleprinters:

  23 Dec 42, 1740 hrs. to 1820 hrs.

  Good evening, Paulus—Last night you submitted for the Supreme Command of the Army a report on available fuel that would permit a 20-km advance. Zeitzler requests that you check up on that again. I personally would like to say this: It appears that the enemy [south of the Kessel] has constantly received reinforcements so that Hoth is forced to take defensive measures. Moreover, the situation on the left flank of the Army Group [the Italian front] makes it necessary to withdraw forces from Hoth.… You will be able to draw your own conclusions as to how this will affect you. I would ask you therefore to examine whether, if there should be no other possibility, you are prepared for Thunderclap, [complete withdrawal of the Kessel] provided it is possible to bring in a limited supply of fuel and provisions during the next few days. If you don’t want to give me an answer right away, let’s have another conversation at 2100 hrs. I must point out to you too, that an adequate supply of the Army is a very difficult problem, in particular in view of the development of the situation on the left flank of the Army Group. Please reply.

  Paulus quickly pointed out the awful danger of his position:

  + + + [Thunderclap] has become difficult, since for several days the enemy has dug in opposite our southwest and south front and, according to radio information, six armored brigades are drawn up behind this defensive front. I estimate we now need a preparatory period of six days for Thunderclap.…

  From here, of course, I can’t tell whether there’s the slightest chance of the Army being relieved in the fairly near future, or whether we shall have to try Thunderclap. If the latter—the sooner the better. But it must be clearly realized that it will be a very difficult operation, unless Hoth manages to tie down really strong enemy forces outside. Am I to take it that I am now authorized to initiate Operation Thunderclap? Once it’s launched, there’ll be no turning back. Over.

  The climax had been reached. Paulus was asking Manstein to give the code word that would send Sixth Army on its way to freedom—or oblivion. Acutely aware that Adolf Hitler had not actually granted permission to leave the Kessel, Paulus now placed his own career and the lives of thousands of his men directly into Erich von Manstein’s hands. He was begging Manstein to relieve him of the onus of such a decision.

  But Manstein brushed aside the plea. Unwilling to take responsibility for initiating Operation Thunderclap against Hitler’s express orders, he gave an indirect answer:

  + + + I can’t give you full authority today. But I hope to get permission tomorrow. The main point is—are you confident that Sixth Army could fight its way out [to the south] and through to Hoth … if we come to the conclusion that adequate supplies over a long period could not be gotten to you? What do you think? Over.

  [Paulus replied:] + + + In that case, I’d have no option but to try. Question—is the envisaged withdrawal of forces from Kirchner’s area [the 6th Panzer Division at the Mishkova bridgehead south of the Kessel] going to take place? Over.

  [Manstein:] + + + Yes—today. How much fuel and supplies would you require before launching Thunderclap and on the assumption that once the action began, further supplies to meet day-to-day requirements would reach you? Over.

  [Paulus:] + + + 1,000 cubic meters [nearly 250,000 gallons of fuel] and 500 tons of food. If we get that, all my armor and motor vehicles will have enough.… [the fuel he needed was almost ten times what the airlift had brought him so far].

  [Manstein:] + + + Well, that’s the lot. Good luck, Paulus.

  [Paulus:] + + + Thank you, sir. And good luck to you, too.

  Only a few hours later, the tanks of the 6th Panzer Division holding the bridgehead at Vassilevska wheeled about and began to recross the Mishkova River.

  Hardbitten panzer crews brushed tears from their eyes as they turned their backs on countrymen waiting for them at Stalingrad. One officer stood in his turret hatch facing the northern horizon, snapped his right hand to his cap in salute, then ducked inside the Mark IV as it rumbled off to a new battle. By midnight the last panzer had left to try and save the Italian Army and stabilize Manstein’s left flank.

  Meanwhile, German soldiers at the southern perimeter of the Kessel were straining to hear and see the vanguards of Manstein’s relief force. But the darkness remained impenetrable. The trapped troops shivered in their snowholes and tried to still the nagging fear that Manstein might never arrive.

  Called to a meeting of 297th Division noncommissioned officers along the southern perimeter of the Kessel, Sgt. Albert Pflüger walked gingerly along an icy path. As he neared the command bunker, he suddenly sensed a dark form off to the right and then a rifle shot sounded. The bullet smashed into his right arm and broke it.

  Knocked to the ground, Pflüger gasped, “Oh, mama, now they’ve got me.” Then he passed out.

  Another NCO came along, wrapped him in a poncho, and started dragging him along the bumpy path. Regaining consciousness, Pflüger insisted on walking and staggered to an aid station, where a doctor quickly bandaged the wound and sent him on to a base hospital.

  On this day, December 23, the sergeant was just one of 686 Germans killed or wounded while waiting for Hitler to approve Thunderclap.

  At dawn on December 24, the great German airfield at Tatsinskaya, 180 miles west of Gumrak, came under artillery fire from the Soviet Third Guards Army. The attack had been expected ever since the Italian Army had dissolved along the Don. All week long, Generals Martin Fiebig and Freiherr von Richthofen implored Hitler for permission to move the transport planes stationed at the field out of danger. But he refused, telling them that German reserves in the area could contain the enemy.

  The Führer had been wro
ng again, and now on this misty morning, Fiebig stood in the control tower and watched in horror as two Ju-52s blew up from enemy shellfire.

  A colonel beside him begged: “Herr General, you must take action. You must give permission to take off.”

  But Fiebig answered: “For that I need Luftflotte authority. In any case, it’s impossible to take off in this fog.”

  Standing at rigid attention, the ashen-faced colonel replied: “Either you take that risk or every unit on the field will be wiped out. All the transport units for Stalingrad, Herr General. The last hope of the surrounded Sixth Army.”

  When another officer agreed, that was enough for General Fiebig. With Russian shells slamming through the fog onto the runways, he ordered an immediate evacuation.

  At 0530 hours, only ten minutes after the attack began, the first lumbering Ju-52s roared to life and scrambled for the sky. Incredible confusion resulted. Planes took off from all directions; two Ju-52s collided in midfield and exploded. Others ripped off their wings and tails. In the midst of this holocaust, Russian tanks appeared on the runways as twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and more planes skimmed low over them and climbed painfully into the murky sky.

  When a Russian T-34 drove past Fiebig’s control tower, it prompted an aide to say: “Herr, General, it is time to go.”

  But he was transfixed as he watched the terrible panorama outside the window, where the last Junkers were rolling down the field, crashing against other wreckage, skidding to a halt and catching fire.

  At 0607, a German tank commander rushed in to say that the enemy had completely overrun Tatsinskaya and, eight minutes later, at 0615, the dejected Fiebig’s own plane lifted off the airfield and headed for Rostov.

  On the ground below, fifty-six aircraft sorely needed for the Stalingrad shuttle, burned brightly through the haze. Only 124 of the airlift planes had gotten away safely.

  Sixty miles north of the wreckage of Fiebig’s airfleet, Lt. Felice Bracci stirred in his stable and rose to the shouts of “Davai bistre!” from impatient Russian guards. Behind Bracci, in the feed trough packed with straw, some of the men who had fought for space in its warmth ignored the guttural demands. They were dead, turned marble-like from the cold.

  Still without food, the huge column of prisoners stumbled into another freezing morning. On the horizon, a lifeless sun peeped out at the Italians. A strange sun, Bracci thought, for those who came from a warm country. His breath quickly congealed on his overcoat collar and turned into tiny, white crystals. Above the column a cloud of vapor floated along with the soldiers, as though they were chain-smoking cigarettes.

  The march continued through the morning. Bracci and another officer, Franco Fusco from Naples, walked side-by-side, saying nothing. Men fell out, rifles cracked and bodies dropped into the snow; the two found comfort in each other’s presence.

  In early afternoon, Bracci saw a church belfry, then a few huts. He walked over a bridge; the river underneath it had disappeared in countless snow storms. Someone called out that they had reached Boguchar, a former German headquarters, now a central assembly point for Russian divisions. Soviet cars and trucks careened past the prisoners, who halted abruptly before a large barracks. With the cold so intense that the Italians could not stand still, they jumped up and down and begged to be let inside. While they complained, a sullen crowd of Russian civilians gathered. Young, old, they muttered threats and spat on Bracci and his comrades. Some of them made gestures of beheading and strangling, then suddenly closed in and pounced on the prisoners. Like crazed wolves, the Russians stripped them of overcoats, shoes, caps, and blankets. Bracci was lucky when the Russians rejected his worn boots and ragged leggings in disgust.

  The guards finally drove the villagers away, then called all doctors inside the building. Bracci was envious. He assumed the doctors’ miseries had ended and they would now take care of sick and wounded in more pleasant surroundings. He wished he had studied medicine at the university.

  The doctors reappeared shortly, stripped of all medical supplies and warm clothing. After a lieutenant from Rome protested their treatment, the Russians took him inside, beat him viciously and threw him back into the street. Even then his misery had not ended. When his puppy, which had faithfully trotted beside him on the march, went to nuzzle the prostrate man, the Russians kicked it to death as he watched.

  The Italian finally were crowded into barracks and, in pitch darkness, fell prostrate on the floor. Bracci was one of the last to get inside. Looking for a space to rest, he found a horizontal beam three feet off the floor and straddling it, tried to sleep. His body sagged, his head drooped. Several times he lost his balance and had to brace his feet on the ground for support. When his shoe hit a small box, he picked it up and thought it seemed full of butter. He dug greedily into it with his fingers and the greasy mixture went down easily. Only later did he find that he had eaten an automotive lubricant.

  Outside the barracks, very far off, the lieutenant heard the sound of bells tolling, ringing out across the icy steppe. From a church somewhere, an organ played a solemn melody. Bracci knew what the sounds meant. He had known all day. Outside, where ordinary people lived, whether in Russia or in his beloved Rome, it was a time for happiness, for family and for love. It was Christmas Eve, 1942.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Vassili Chuikov was in a festive mood. Within the past twenty-four hours, Col. Ivan Lyudnikov’s 138th Division finally had made contact with the rest of the Soviet Sixty-second Army. For more than a month, Lyudnikov and his men had held off both the German 305th Division and the pioneers, who had first driven them onto the Volga beach. Now replenished by food, ammunition, and recruits brought over the ice bridge from the east bank, the 138th Division surged up from the shore to the flat ground behind the factories and turned south. Sixty-second Army headquarters triumphantly recorded the success: “Direct communication with Lyudnikov’s division has now been established.”

  His worries ended on that score, Chuikov spent most of December 24 saying good-bye to old comrades. In his tunneledout office, he smoked his leather-holdered cigarettes and raised tumblers of vodka to toast fellow heroes of the siege, who tearfully embraced their commander. Among them were Gen. Ivan Petrovich Sologub, with whom he had fought since the summer battles on the steppe; Gen. Fedor Nikandrovich Smekhotvorov, who defended the Red October Plant almost to the last man; and Gen. Victor Grigorievich Zholudev, whose elite commandos died at the tractor factory.

  These officers had been ordered out of battle to the far side of the Volga and rest camps, taking their shattered divisions with them. Once numbering more than twenty thousand strong, the two thousand survivors now walked eastward across the ice-covered river, congested with heavy trucks and thousands of fresh infantrymen going the other way.

  Only a short distance from Chuikov’s farewell party for his generals, a child ran through the ruins of the suburb of Dar Gova. “Come quick!” he screamed. “They’ve taken Sacha!”

  The Fillipovs were not surprised. They had been anticipating this awful moment for weeks, and Mrs. Fillipov quickly scooped up some food the Germans had given Sacha for his shoe repairs and rushed out into the front yard.

  Accompanied by two other teenagers, one a girl, Sacha was just going by. A platoon of enemy troops hemmed in the young Russians, who were walking barefoot through the snow. Mrs. Fillipov reached past the guards and wordlessly thrust the food at her son. As he took it, a soldier pushed her out of the way, and the procession wound around the corner to a barren clump of trees on Brianskaya Street.

  A small crowd of Russian civilians gathered. The Fillipovs clung to each other, staring hypnotically at lengths of rope being flung over branches of the forlorn acacias. A German looped a noose around Sacha’s head and tightened the thick knot under his left ear; Mr. Fillipov moaned pathetically and broke away from his wife. Blinded by tears, he stumbled away, never looking back as the command was given for the execution. Mrs. Fillipov stood alone, facing Sacha whi
le his tongue shot out from between his teeth and his face turned blue.

  Their task accomplished, the German soldiers formed ranks and marched away. The Russian witnesses scattered silently into the gloom, and Brianskaya Street suddenly was deserted except for the three children dangling in the wind and Mrs. Fillipov, who moved to her son’s body. She listened for a moment to the creaking rope, then reached up and stroked her boy’s leg and spoke softly, lovingly to him.

  Darkness fell. Mrs. Fillipov continued her solitary vigil, standing dutifully beside the stiffening bare feet of her master cobbler, dead by hanging at the age of fifteen.

  “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blatter …” almost every German bunker rang with the melody until suddenly the night was torn apart by the simultaneous explosions of thousands of multicolored flares that flashed across the sky from Orlovka in the northeast, to Baburkin in the west, on down to Marinovka and Karpovka, and back eastward through Zybenko to the Tsaritsa Gorge at the Volga. The brilliant fireworks display lasted for several minutes. Underneath the dazzling lights, German soldiers shielded their eyes and marveled at the beauty surrounding them.

  It was their salute to the Holy Season, a joyous time to every German, and for several days, German officers and men alike had prepared feverishly for the celebration. Capt. Gerhard Meunch even drafted a speech. At his command post in a cellar of the Red October Plant, he labored for hours to hone his message, then, in the early evening, he went to a nearby garage where a Christmas tree, carved from wood, adorned one corner of the cavernous room. In groups of thirty, his infantrymen appeared to sit around him as he welcomed them and distributed cigarettes, wine, or tea with rum, a piece of bread, and a slice of horse meat.

  Relaxed by the liquor, the men listened attentively while Meunch spoke quietly of the need for keeping up the fight against the Russians. Still slightly unnerved by his recent brush with mutineers in the ranks, he took pains to underline a soldier’s duty to orders, especially in such a dreadful situation as at Stalingrad. The pep talk seemed to appeal to the troops, who all joined in singing “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”) with him. Meunch noticed that in midchorus, a number of the men were so choked with emotion they had to stop singing and wipe tears from their eyes.