Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

But there still remained this new assignment up in the Don River elbow… A short-term operation, by all accounts. It wouldn’t be long before he got some more gen about it.

A sudden jerk as the car’s brakes were slammed on jolted Breuer from his reverie. Lakosch opened his door and looked out.

‘A crossroads!’ he announced. ‘Should we carry straight on?’

‘I think this is where we have to turn left. Wait here a mo, though, and wipe some petrol over the windscreen so we can see where we’re going at last!’

The first lieutenant clambered out of the car and, after shaking and stretching his frozen legs a few times, walked over to the weather-beaten signpost. With some difficulty, he was finally able to decipher, on the arm pointing west, Russian letters spelling out the name ‘Vertyachi’.

‘Left it is!’ he called out to the driver. ‘Still twenty-five kilometres to the Don!’

The well-worn track to Vertyachi was as smooth as a properly metalled road, and with virtually no traffic. The small car shot westward like an arrow, away from the Volga and Stalingrad and towards the Don.

‘Seems like you’re in a real hurry to get away from the place,’ Breuer remarked jovially.

‘Oh, you know, Lieutenant – bloody Stalingrad!’

‘Now, now, Lakosch. We should be happy that we’re actually in the city. And hopefully we can dig in there. Capturing it could decide the outcome of the war. You can’t go counting the sacrifices in those circumstances, especially not your personal ones.’

Lakosch had his own thoughts on that subject, but kept them to himself. Breuer fell silent too. After the relentless monotony of the last few days and weeks, their sudden departure today had profoundly agitated him and he couldn’t stop his mind from churning. He felt that his last words had not been entirely honest. Didn’t he also increasingly feel the urge to just get away from Stalingrad? And hadn’t he found himself thinking much more of late about leave and his wife and children at home than about the poor devils up at the front on the Volga? How egotistical people had become over these three years of war! It took a Herculean effort to suppress the selfish bastard that lurked inside everybody. Breuer felt duty-bound to feel sick to the stomach that they’d left Stalingrad, but he couldn’t help but experience a feeling of liberation all the same. Sure, Stalingrad had to be held at all costs, and so it would be: no question. Hitler’s words from the speech he’d delivered at the opening of the fourth annual Winter War Relief Programme, which he’d heard broadcast over the tannoy at the hospital, were still ringing in his ears.

‘No ships come up the Volga any more. Our key objective must now be to take Stalingrad… And once we’ve achieved that goal you can be sure no one will ever dislodge us.’

The wounded men crowded into the hospital vestibule that day, crouching or sitting packed like sardines on the floor, listened in silence and stared dull-eyed into the middle distance. Of course they all recognized full well the military importance of the battle for Stalingrad. But the sheer crushing difficulty of the struggle weighed down on them, and everyone present in that room felt that they , at least, had now sacrificed enough for that miserable heap of ruins on the Volga, and that others should now be brought in to do their bit. That was why they kept quiet – Breuer’s own division had suffered enough too. They deserved to be relieved. They should be happy!

‘There it is!’

The lieutenant gave a start.

‘Who, what?’

‘There: the Don!’

They both leaned forward to get a better view. The road dropped away gradually and at the foot of the slope stood a small settlement, behind which the silver-grey ribbon of the river lay spread out. Small, dark patches of woodland, the like of which they’d only seen in their dreams the past few months, stood large as life on the far bank. The car rolled slowly through the almost deserted village, then turned onto a corduroy road that ended in the bare wooden planks of a pontoon bridge.

They could clearly hear machine-gun fire now, interspersed with occasional more powerful explosions. The fortified line to the north sealing off this area from Stalingrad was not that far away. Near the bridge there was clear water, but in the distance they could see broken floes of matt-grey ice. Flat meadows and sparse scrubland surrounded the river at this point.

The Don! Breuer couldn’t help but recall the day he’d crossed it for the first time. It had been at the end of July, far to the south of here. The sun was blazing down, and thick clouds of dust were being kicked up on the roads along which the army was advancing, turning foliage and grass, vehicles and men alike a yellowish brown. Back then he’d still been a company commander in a motorized infantry division. In a rapid thrust, the unit had forced its way across the river at the wine-growing village of Zymlyanskaya. A brief rest stop there had given the sweat-caked, dust-covered troops an opportunity to take a dip in the fast-flowing waters of the river, which lay there peacefully before them like some sleeping giant from mythology. The Cossacks called it the ‘quiet’ Don. Certainly, an aura of silence and secrecy lay over the wooded banks there, and over the vineyards and the shabby wooden shacks poking up here and there out of the verdant landscape. Even the dead Russian pilot lying prone, with one waxen hand pointing skyward, on a shining sandbank midstream, next to the wreckage of his plane (half of which had already been carried away by the wind), couldn’t disturb the peace of the scene. But the strong current, against which the swimming soldiers could make no headway, hinted at the restrained power that lay dormant in this giant.

A few days later, all the hopes they had nurtured of pushing on to the Caucasus and seeing the palm groves on the shores of the Black Sea had run into the sand. The division was ordered to swing northeast, and that was when Breuer heard for the first time the name that to him had an uneasy, ominous ring about it right from the start – Stalingrad. There ensued a rapid march across the desolate Kalmyk steppe, whose fine-grained sand penetrated every crack and joint and destroyed the engines of vehicles, followed by a series of expensive and fruitless battles in the south, until they finally managed to execute a flanking manoeuvre and enter the city from the west. And that was just the beginning! There followed intense street battles, in which possession of every house, every cellar, every wall and every heap of rubble was bitterly contested, hand-to-hand fighting that cost the lives of untold numbers and caused the German divisions to melt away like April snow in the sun. Throughout the whole course of the war, there had never been anything like it. And even though three months had passed, this struggle was still going on…