Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The colonel, meanwhile, went off in search of the Steigmann task force’s staff officers. On the road through the village, their car was flagged down by a sergeant standing beside a petrol drum and clutching a filling hose.

‘Still got plenty of petrol in your tank?’ The driver told him yes, he had.

‘Take some anyway,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve got orders not to let anyone drive by without filling up. We’ve still got quite a few drums of gasoline lying around,’ he continued, on spotting the two officers in the back, ‘and we can’t go leaving it to the Ivans!’

The staff headquarters they were looking for was situated in a house in the north of the village. In a low-ceilinged room, the new divisional commander came across a group of officers all in the best of spirits.

‘We can safely say the Russians won’t be capturing this area, Colonel!’ announced Colonel Steigmann, a giant of a man who towered easily head and shoulders over the slight figure of the divisional commander. ‘We’ve given them a bloody nose now five times in a row!’

‘I’m sorry to have to begin my new assignment with an unpopular order,’ began Colonel von Hermann, ‘but we have to abandon this position. We’re in serious danger of being encircled. And we need you to throw your weight behind us in the Golubaya Valley, which will be our new line of defence.’ General consternation gripped the room.

Colonel Steigmann was breathing heavily.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed at length, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘That’s a real body blow! How am I going to break it to my men?’

During the return journey, on the high ground outside the village, von Hermann’s column came under fire from a Russian battery. Splinters of wood and clods of earth rained down on the vehicles. A number of wounded men were staggering along the road in a bewildered state. The colonel ordered the column to stop and pick them up, personally helping the desperate troops clamber aboard.

‘Easy does it, lads,’ he told them. ‘You know what they say: more haste, less speed.’

He pulled a packet of sandwiches from the pocket of his coat and divided them up among the men.

A detour to another unit to inform it to pull back as well took them past a forward airfield. The place was as quiet as the grave. About thirty aircraft, a mixture of fighters and reconnaissance planes, were parked on the apron, all of them wrecked.

‘We had to destroy them,’ explained a solitary anti-aircraft gunner standing guard on the road. ‘They couldn’t take off in the fog. The ground crews, and the pilots and radio operators who didn’t make it out, are up front there with the infantry unit.’ The colonel stared pensively at this sorry scene of self-inflicted destruction. Was he thanking his lucky stars that his son wasn’t with a front-line fighter squadron? Lieutenant Wiese would never have dared broach the subject out loud, and the inscrutable expression on the colonel’s face was giving nothing away.

The hectic day full of bustle and aggravation means that Breuer is only able to snatch a few hours’ worth of restless sleep. In the morning, when he goes over to see Unold, he encounters Captain Engelhard outside the door of the chief of staff’s bunker. He hardly recognizes him. Engelhard’s face is like a tattered curtain behind which a huge conflagration is raging.

‘The Russians have advanced to Kalach!’ whispers the captain. ‘Our new orders are to withdraw to the far bank of the Don!’

Breuer is shocked by what he sees. His first thought, on the spur of the moment, is that Engelhard has gone mad. ‘The far bank of the Don?’ he repeats cautiously. ‘But we’re already on the far bank of the Don!’

‘Good God, man, don’t you get it? To the eastern bank of the Don, I mean – towards Stalingrad! The whole of the Sixth Army’s been encircled. Hitler’s ordered it to take up a defensive position in the city!’

The first lieutenant’s face is a frozen mask of horror. A feeling of constriction rises up in him and takes a stranglehold grip around his throat. ‘Encircled?’ he asks stupidly.

‘You can’t have heard the news yet, evidently! It’s the same bloody mess in the south too, around Beketovka. And in the Romanian sector. The Russian units linked up at Kalach yesterday!’

‘But that can’t be right,’ Breuer stammers, then shouts out loud: ‘It’s just not possible!’ Engelhard hands him a slip of paper.

‘Look at this, we just received it! Order of the day from Paulus.’

With a trembling hand, Breuer takes the note. He reads the message as though he’s peering through a veil.

‘Soldiers of the Sixth Army! The army has been encircled! That is not through any fault of yours. As always, you have fought hard and courageously, until the enemy was breathing down your necks… The Führer promised us help, and the Führer has been true to his word… Now it’s imperative that we hold on until the outside help that’s been promised finally brings us relief!’

His hands fall to his sides.

‘The far bank of the Don…,’ he repeats dully, still far from grasping the enormity of the situation. ‘Can we manage that, then? We’ve hardly any fuel left!’

The captain shrugs his shoulders; his eyes are moist with tears.

‘Anything that can’t move must be abandoned. Kallweit’s already been ordered to blow up the tanks if need be.’

Breuer continues on his way, in a daze. Reality keeps ambushing him in fragments of thoughts: Encircled… Blow up the tanks… The Führer has kept his word… To Stalingrad!… Daddy, when are you coming home next?… Encircled… Encircled.

Captain Fackelmann comes rushing up. All his former youthfulness has drained from his face. He seems to have aged by years.

‘Have you heard? Have you heard?’

Breuer nods.

‘It’s terrible, though, just awful! More than a whole army suddenly encircled… And what do you think of that surprise attack at Kalach? Apparently they used captured German tanks and floodlights… A real act of bravado!’

A few hours later, a change of occupancy takes place at a command post a few kilometres to the northeast. On the map the place is marked with the legend ‘dairy’ but there’s no house in evidence anywhere nearby. In a gorge, well hidden by dense bushes, is a row of well-appointed bunkers. Electric light, built-in beds with mattresses, and a toilet block with a proper sink. The former occupants (infantry staff officers, who in the meantime have marched east) had, it seemed, got themselves settled here like they were planning to stay for an eternity.

The men of the Intelligence Section squeeze themselves into one of the bunkers here, alongside the filing department and the cartographic division – thirteen men all told, in a room that was meant for three. No matter, it’s warm here, and the brick oven allows you to cook up something really fast. Unold, still a bundle of nerves, hounds Breuer out once more, sending him down to the local village. There are rumours that Russian tanks have broken through there. The snowbound lane is choked with traffic – trucks, assault guns and long lines of horse-drawn carts. German foot soldiers, on their own or in groups, and little isolated gaggles of Romanian troops shamble along, shivering and lethargic. It’s nigh-on impossible to find a way through the crush. Machine-gun teams have taken up position along the ridge. These men with their white winter camouflage, scanning the surrounding countryside with a steady, alert gaze, are points of fixity in the maelstrom of disorder.

In the middle of the village, Breuer finds Colonel Steigmann, standing in the back of an open-topped half-track. ‘What’s that? Russian tanks?’ he says with a dry chuckle. ‘Nothing of that sort here! You’re obviously all a bit frazzled in your unit! A few of our own self-propelled guns drove through here a while back. Some idiot clearly mistook them for Russians!’