by David Fraser
‘It’s a big job to get these tonnages in to one airfield, turning aircraft round in time, clearing the airfield of stores and so forth. I can imagine. And the snow can’t make it easier.’
The pilot laughed. ‘That’s true. Often there’s been no flying at all. But that’s not the worst of it. At the far end they have a job to fight off our fellows trying to help themselves. They’ve a real security problem I’m told.’
Toni looked at him. ‘You imply that some of the troops are out of control?’
The pilot looked uneasy and shrugged his shoulders.
‘These stories always get exaggerated, Herr Major. I expect it’s a small, criminal minority, who’ve lost their self-respect.’
‘It always is,’ Toni said half to the pilot, half to himself. ‘It always is a small minority,’ and he wondered what he would find.
They took off at last. The light was fading rapidly. Out of the window Toni saw great fires blazing as they approached the pocket.
‘They’ve fired a lot of our own dumps,’ the pilot said through the intercom. ‘Couldn’t defend the perimeter, couldn’t cart the stuff back. No transport, no fuel, no horses. Burnt it to stop the Ivans getting it. Pity.’
A lieutenant approached Toni as he walked from the aircraft. The sky was darkening. Grey, ruined buildings stood out like tombstones from the dirty snow of airfield and surrounding landscape. From what Toni knew was the perimeter of the pocket a steady pounding of artillery could be heard. Russian artillery. The flashes lit the horizon. An icy wind swept the tarmac.
The lieutenant saluted and reported his name. In the half-light Toni saw his pallor and the sunken eyes of exhaustion.
‘And although he probably works hard he’s certainly better off as regards shelter and food than the wretched landser in the infantry companies,’ thought Toni grimly.
He saluted in turn and held out his hand – with a smile. Even in Stalingrad, Toni Rudberg had a smile which could arouse response. He drove away every thought that he might be on the way to Bucharest and a few days of warmth, peace, colour, normality. He smiled as if, in all the world, he wished to be nowhere but here, on the Volga, in December, 1942. The other gave something like a smile in return.
‘Welcome to Sixth Army!’
Chapter 17
The Headquarters of Sixth Army were housed in a number of interconnected underground bunkers, near Gumrak airfield and railway station, deep excavated and well protected. The staff officers, clerks, orderlies and telephonists Toni observed as he was ushered into these sombre depths, moved slowly, ponderously, as if somehow expressing in their apathetic limbs the expectation of calamity. There was a nightmare quality in Sixth Army Headquarters. Toni reported to the Chief of Staff in person. Visitors, particularly visitors of junior rank with a mission to ‘report independently’, were not naturally popular with any command. There had, Toni knew, been plenty of such visitors to Stalingrad. All had brought back the same message. Whether in handling visitors or in describing their problems to the outside world by teleprinter Sixth Army must, Toni thought, by now feel that they were conducting a dialogue of the deaf.
The Chief of Staff looked at him cynically.
‘I’m surprised it’s thought necessary to ask for another “independent report”! The facts of the situation here must be clear to everyone by now.’
Toni inwardly sympathized with him.
‘Herr General, I hope that anything I report will have the effect of being useful to Sixth Army, not the reverse.’
‘What do you want to see? I’m proposing to send you to the 51st Corps.’ He pointed to a map on the wall. ‘They tell me you’re to fly back by 20th December at the latest. That gives you four days.’
‘Herr General, I would like, above all, to attach myself to an infantry regiment, preferably one in the city itself, in contact with the enemy. Perhaps on the Volga front.’
‘That can be arranged, of course.’ The Chief of Staff shrugged his shoulders. He glanced at a larger map of the whole front.
‘From this morning’s report it looks as if another big Russian attack is starting on the Don, in the north. I expect your Division will be involved. The Soviet Voronezh Front are throwing in everything from the north-east.’ He nodded dismissal.
That, at least, was not Sixth Army’s responsibility, although it made even less probable the success of any attempt to break through to them from the west. Toni digested the information. It was no doubt true that his own Division – with all of the thirty tanks they had left after the recent fighting! – would be involved if there were another big attack on the Don. He expected they’d already been breaking it to the troops that there was to be no brief period in reserve as promised. He felt like a deserter to be away from his own Divisional family, his own Staff comrades, his own commander at such a time. But no deserter would have chosen to escape into Stalingrad! He saluted and left the bunker.
Toni peered over the edge of a chipped stone window sill. The air was icy but now and then it was absolutely necessary to breathe a change from the evil stench inside. It wasn’t the fault of the troops – their way of life condemned them – but the result was nauseous.
About Toni was the shell of what had once been a block of workers’ flats. The peeling paint of a title in cyrillic script was still decipherable on one outer wall and Toni could translate it – ‘Workers Block Red Dawn’. The upper storeys of the tall building had been gutted by fire but the street level and extensive cellars were usable. Fragments of collapsed ceiling and fallen masonry littered the floors. Broken glass was everywhere. Dust invaded nostrils and lungs and never seemed to clear. It was always possible that a salvo of Soviet shells would bring down on their heads some more of the precariously lodged brick and stonework of the upper building but this possibility – like all the others, all of them worse – was dully accepted by the remaining men of the detachment of Combat Group Schroder, a unit of 305th Infantry Division. Toni crouched by his window, binoculars in hand.
In the day and night Toni had spent with this Combat Group, moving from detachment to detachment, from one pile of rubble to another, he had often recalled, and with agreement, the words of the wounded Brenndorf.
‘They’re still magnificent, our fellows, but God! How they’re suffering!’
These men were indeed suffering. By any rational use of language they were starving. The tiny bread ration, the limited quantities of decayed horseflesh, carefully husbanded and stirred into a soup, were insufficient to sustain the human body in any sort of physical activity. Toni noted their lassitude, their slowness of reaction, the dumb resignation more terrible even than mutiny. These men had given up hope. They would have been unsurprised to learn that that very day – it was 18th December – their Army Commander had received a direct order from Field Marshal von Manstein to assemble his forces and break out to the westward. They would have been equally unsurprised to be told that General Paulus, placed as he was under the direct supervision of the Army High Command, the Führer himself, had declined to obey the order, which conflicted with his instructions from the highest level that in all circumstances Stalingrad was to be held, that no thought of breakout was to be countenanced if it involved giving up ground.
They would have grunted, only half comprehending. They had ceased to believe or trust. Every human being’s energies, whatever his rank or intelligence, were concentrated on the difficult business of survival from one hour to the next. Outside the pocket the last relief attempt, made by units at pitifully low strength, was already stumbling to its unsuccessful end. For weeks to come there would be further rumours, expectations of other similar attempts. The men of Combat Group Schroder felt little but scepticism at such tales when they heard them. Indeed, they felt little of anything save cold, hunger, pain and fear.
Yet, Toni recognized with an unusual surge of emotion, they were still fighting. While he had been with these men there had already been two Russian attacks. Small-scale, savage attacks – now here,
now there and apparently uncoordinated, wearing down the defenders by their incessant ferocity – formed the pattern of the fighting in Stalingrad. Toni’s blood had been fired by seeing with what courage, skill and discipline those attacks had been beaten off. The Russians had come without warning, leaping over rubble in the streets, aiming bursts of fire with machine pistols at every glassless window or door as they rushed forward, uttering their weird cries, covered by sustained machine gun fire from upper windows of the blocks they held. Schroder’s men had been at first held well back from the windows, seeking cover within the buildings themselves. Then, as the Russians came closer and started to appear at windows and doorways the Germans opened up with everything they had at point blank range. At the same time they struck the attackers in flank with machine gun fire and grenades from the upper floors of an adjacent block: a group was specially placed there for the purpose. Then, the landsers started to move forward, firing, hurling grenades from within the huge building itself. The Russians stopped, dropped – and fled. Two attacks followed each other with exactly the same sequence.
‘They’ll get wise to our system,’ said Toni, to the noncommissioned officer next to him. He felt an enormous exhilaration. ‘They’ll find a way round.’
‘No, Herr Major, the Ivans always do the same thing.’
From those attacks, eleven ‘Ivans’ could be counted in the snow. As Toni watched, the blood running from the head of a wounded Russian began to freeze. The man himself was propped upright and stationary against a wall, so hung with weapons and ammunition, so dark and misshapen in his quilted felt clothing, that he looked like a Christmas tree leaned against a woodman’s shed awaiting purchase. Toni could not see whether he was dead or not but he did not fall. The frozen blood had the appearance of some sort of obscene decoration.
The Feldwebel in charge of the detachment grunted. He’d found it strange that a General Staff Major should come and live in their cellar, even for an hour, but he’d given up looking for any proper order of things in Stalingrad. It was hard to snap to attention all the time, Herr Major this, Herr Major that. But he had to admit that this one seemed a decent fellow. He not only talked to you, asked sensible questions and listened carefully to the answers: he also gave the impression of enjoying himself, God help him!
‘Of course,’ the Feldwebel said to himself sourly, ‘the Major’s only here as a tourist. Short visit. And you can tell from his face he’s well fed.’
It was indeed true that outside the Stalingrad pocket there was no great shortage of food on the Don front. But Toni’s ebullience and laughter did something for these men. Nobody had heard laughter for a long time.
‘Have we taken many prisoners?’ Toni was looking at the human Christmas tree. He kept his voice casual.
‘There were a lot early on, Herr Major. The General ordered that they were to be sent back to the Russian lines. We couldn’t feed them. It seemed – still, that was the order.’
‘What happened?’
‘They wouldn’t go! Preferred to chance their luck with us, I suppose. There are lots of Ivan wounded, of course, but a great many more German wounded. In the cellars mostly, where they haven’t managed to collect them in the dressing stations.’
‘Thirty thousand wounded men have been flown out already,’ said Toni casually. It was one of the statistics in his briefing. The Feldwebel said nothing. Privately he guessed it should be a hundred thousand at least. They’d lost half their strength from wounds or sickness even by the beginning of December.
Two hundred metres down the street was a barricade of rubble and concrete blocks. It was at this Toni had been peering from the window ledge.
‘Did we put that barricade up?’
‘Yes, and we held it for ten days. The Ivans tried to drive us off it. They failed. Then, when we got short of men, the Lieutenant pulled us back here. You need fewer men to hold this end of the street.’
‘I can see that. Do the Ivans man that barricade from the other side?’
‘I don’t think so, Herr Major. I think it’s between the two sides, in no-man’s land you could say.’
Toni’s task was to observe and report upon the general condition of the fighting troops. Neither his sense of military propriety nor his instructions gave him latitude to involve himself in tactical details. He was a visiting General Staff Major, not a Corporal: although, during the last attack, he’d found a light machine gun whose Number One was wounded and settled down to use it in a most effective fashion. The men had been amazed but they’d liked it. One had even chuckled –
‘We’ve only got ten belts of ammunition for that gun till they get supplies to us, Herr Major!’
Toni had smiled back grimly. For the truth was that, despite his instructions, despite the disgusting conditions, Toni was enjoying himself, as he always did at moments of challenge. He could not stand aside from action. Now he looked at the barricade, considering.
‘It might be best to demolish it. It’s giving them too good a covered approach. If we knock it down we’ll be able to sweep the whole length of the street. Break them up earlier.’
‘We’d need an assault gun or a Panzer,’ said the Feldwebel dubiously. ‘We’ve seen none of those in this sector, Herr Major. We’re on our own. And the barricade does block assault by an Ivan tank!’
‘That cuts both ways.’
Toni’s binoculars were up again. He ached for even a small detachment of armour, something with which to attack, surprise, shake these Russians, knock them off balance. The Feldwebel nodded. No doubt the Major would convey his ideas on the tactical situation to Captain Schroder in due course. Whether the latter would relish them was questionable. Toni was still looking thoughtfully down the street.
‘I want to have a look beyond the barricade. I’m going along that broken wall between us and the next detachment. Then I’ll scramble to somewhere from where I can see over. I shan’t be long.’
‘Herr Major,’ said the Feldwebel respectfully, ‘I have been made responsible for your safety. One can never tell when an Ivan sniper will appear. You will be in the open.’
There were already many thousands of wounded German soldiers lying uncared for in the Stalingrad cellars. The medical teams did their best but ambulances were as short as was fuel. The Feldwebel already had five men in various stages of suffering. He didn’t want to add a damaged Major to his responsibilities.
Toni looked at him coldly.
‘Nonsense. One can’t climb to the upper stories here because they’re falling down, you said so yourself. So in order to see I must get out and up. And you know that no possible sniper position overlooks that wall.’
The Feldwebel shuffled to attention with an inward sigh. Toni slipped his spurs into his greatcoat pocket, jumped lightly from the window sill and scrambled with agility up a pile of rubble to the top of a broken wall that ran parallel to the street and toward the enemy.
The men from Combat Group Schroder watched without emotion. He seemed a good sort, but if he wanted to get himself killed quickly that was his business. Toni moved nimbly along the wall, reached the far end where it joined the jagged corner of another ruined building, climbed a few feet and brought up his binoculars. He was, as far as the watching Feldwebel could judge, in full view of any Russians hidden behind the street barricade.
Nothing happened. No shot rang out. Toni’s body was silhouetted against the leaden sky beyond the barricade, although the Feldwebel acknowledged grudgingly that it was probably more difficult to observe from the opposite direction.
‘The bloody fool’s got away with it,’ he thought with relief. ‘Now, he’ll come back.’ And that same bloody fool, who might be one of those said to bear a charmed life, would presumably then go away and leave them alone.
Toni, however, was not yet disposed to return. He looked to his left. The bodies of Russian soldiers still lay in the snow. None moved. He supposed they were all dead: from every point of view he hoped so. But to his right his attention ha
d been attracted by something unexpected.
On the right-hand side of the wall along which Toni had clambered – hidden from the men of Combat Group Schroder in the building from which he had started and also hidden, as far as he could judge, from any other German detachment in adjoining blocks was a small, enclosed yard. No upper windows gave on to it. It appeared to have no direct access to any street. Toni supposed that in other times, when these buildings were standing, various doors gave on to the yard. It probably housed rubbish bins and an incinerator. There was a manhole cover in the middle of its rough concrete floor. The surrounding buildings on three sides had suffered varying degrees of destruction. Toni’s wall formed the fourth side. It was a squalid little area which overlooked nothing, led to nowhere and appeared to have, in present circumstances, no tactical significance. Toni surveyed it from his perch without particular interest.
As he looked the manhole cover appeared to move. Toni stared, fascinated. Had he imagined it? Everything seemed still and desolate.
Toni instantly decided to inspect further. But if he climbed down to the yard would he be able to haul himself up again? He didn’t want to be caged in this depressing little rectangle which neither Army appeared to think worth occupying or even watching. He saw, however, that the corner of the building on one side of the yard – the corner nearest Combat Group Schroder’s detachment – was damaged in a way which would certainly afford footholds, so that he could easily climb out of the yard at that end, regain the wall along which he had scrambled and thence descend to Workers Block Red Dawn. Below him there was an intervening, sloping cornice and if he steadied himself for a second on that it wasn’t much of a drop into the yard. He started to lower himself from the ledge on which he stood. The cornice was almost his whole height below the top of the wall, however, and as his boots found it he realized that there was no question of hauling himself up again. Field boots and a greatcoat weren’t ideal climbing gear, Toni grinned to himself, panting, as he balanced on the cornice, ready to loose his hold on the wall, twist his body and jump. The important thing was not to do something inept like spraining an ankle:
