Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Strange how horsemeat tastes different here!’

‘Horsemeat?’ asked the others in horror.

‘Yes, horsemeat!’ Harras replied indignantly. ‘What else could it be?’ At the divisional Staff HQ, it had invariably been horsemeat, and even that had become scarcer over time.

‘Look here, sunshine!’ exclaimed the lieutenant colonel. ‘If you think you can come here and start taking the piss…’

It took a lot of persuading to convince the CO that horse flesh was the only thing soldiers at other units got to eat; he looked at the sergeant major like he was a leper.

‘Listen, old son,’ the quartermaster told Harras cheerfully, ‘nothing comes from nothing! The division here planned ahead. We were on the move the whole summer, down to Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk. And in September we got hold of five truckloads of canteen provisions that had been in storage in Vienna. Still all the good stuff from France! And if you think we were about to let High Command know, you must be off your rocker. What, so we could waste away here on basic rations while someone else scoffed our sardines and potatoes? Not bloody likely, mate – “finders, keepers” more like!’

Harras thought that was fair enough. He couldn’t help but call to mind the bloke who’d succeeded Senior Quartermaster Zimmermann, who’d gone missing. The man was a hopeless idiot, who’d sit for hours poring over his lists and totting things up. He told them about him: ‘Can you imagine, one time he got twenty loaves of bread too many delivered from the Corps – by mistake, of course! A total stroke of luck, the sort of thing that only occurs once a century… so what does the twat go and do? He only sends them back, and apologizes into the bargain for not having paid more attention!’

The others laughed uproariously.

Slowly but surely, Sergeant Major Harras got used to life at the front. When the bunker began to shake from the impact of shells landing ever closer during artillery barrages, he still occasionally caught the lieutenant colonel, whose nerves were dulled by alcohol, giving him a mocking look, seeing if he’d crack. But by now Harras had managed to control the facial twitch that betrayed the trembling fear he was experiencing inside. Gradually he came to understand the language of the front. He’d learned to tell the difference between the insistent clacking noise of the Russian machine guns and the nervous chattering noise of their German counterparts, and during artillery bombardments he was easily able now to distinguish the report of a howitzer from the sound of a shell hitting home, and the whiplash crack of anti-tank shells from the dull, harsh thump of mortar rounds. From the sound and the duration of the whistling noise that projectiles made as they flew through the air, he could also guess roughly how long it would be before they exploded. His instincts became sharper, and began to react automatically to a variety of different noises. From day to day, Harras felt more and more like an old hand at the front. One time, the Arse told him about the ‘shabby dress code’ that existed among some of the very traditional student duelling societies. Harras was enthralled by the idea of this code, in so far as he understood it. Looking in his little hand mirror, he noted with satisfaction his mud-streaked face, with the stubble of his beard poking through like corn stalks in a field. He decided he’d grow a beard.

Thus far, then, Sergeant Major Harras was pretty pleased with the way things had turned out. Even so, some things still troubled him deeply. There was talk of them being relieved. The nervous tension increased palpably among the men as the days passed.

‘Listen, Sar’nt Major… Can’t you hear it? Shelling… to the south!’

‘No, it’s further to the right, in the direction of Kalach!’

‘Look out, lads, they’re coming!’

They’d get him out of bed in the middle of the night, convinced they’d seen white flares go up in the far distance. One day, Colonel von Hermann and Lieutenant Colonel Unold turned up at their positions in the company of the divisional commander, and completed a thorough tour of inspection. Although they didn’t say much, they seemed to be making preparations for a breakout.

‘You’ve really got to get a grip on yourself now, Harras,’ Unold told him as he was leaving, ‘so you can come back and join us as soon as possible!’

The Russians, too, had clearly grown restless of late. At night you could hear the sound of engines behind their front line, and one day they launched an attack in strength on the right-hand neighbouring sector of the front around Marinovka, evidently with the sole intention of disrupting any potential attempt to break out.

‘It’s a good thing that this nonsense, this laughable encirclement business, is coming to an end here!’ Harras told himself. Then again, he didn’t relish the prospect of being in the vanguard when they broke out and dying a hero’s death. Accordingly, he made a point of monitoring his heart rate and listening to his breathing, trying to determine if there was any irregularity there that might offer the possibility of an honourable withdrawal from the field of combat. But it’d be even better, he thought, if they’d just finally make him an officer. Then he’d be posted back to divisional Staff HQ – Unold had promised him in as many words. And so he kept a keen eye out for any opportunity to distinguish himself, if possible without placing himself in any danger. And the opportunity duly arrived.

‘Manstein’s coming!’ The relief that the three hundred thousand men trapped in the Cauldron had been longing for with every fibre of their bodies was now close at hand. The great hope that, time and again, had sustained their fighting spirit and their will to hold on through the dark nights and the cold and hunger was now about to be realized.

Hitler had appointed Field Marshal Erich von Manstein Supreme Commander of Operations in the Stalingrad region. Goebbels’s propaganda machine had trumpeted Manstein as the conqueror of the Crimea and the man who had captured the hitherto impregnable fortress of Sevastopol. Since then, he’d been widely seen as some kind of military miracle-worker. His name hung in the air in bunkers and trenches, at food distribution centres, field kitchens and latrines. ‘Have you heard? Manstein’s started his push!’ ‘Lads, I really think Manstein’s going to do it! I tell you, he’ll have us free within a week!’ ‘I’ve heard he’s got new tanks, amazing things they are, they just shrug off anti-tank fire!’ ‘That’s right! I’ve seen them myself… someone in Pitomnik told me… he’s just taken delivery of five hundred of them!’ ‘Manstein, now, he’s the one who…’ Manstein, nothing but Manstein! None of the troops had ever seen the field marshal in person, and hardly anyone even recognized his photograph. The besieged men of Stalingrad were investing all their heartfelt hopes in a name.

But there was another man whose name almost no one mentioned, and only the various staffs knew that he was playing a key part in the rescue operation that had just got underway. This was General Hermann Hoth, former commander-in-chief of the Fourth Panzer Army, some elements of which had been caught along with Paulus’s Sixth Army in the Stalingrad Cauldron. Many men of the Tank Corps still had a vivid image of the small, hyperactive general, who was in the habit of turning up unannounced at the spearhead of armoured thrusts, and whose sarcastic severity had earned him the nickname ‘the Poison Dwarf’. Hoth had been given overall command of the newly formed Army Group Don, made up of three German tank divisions and a number of Romanian infantry and cavalry formations. On the twelfth of December, he pushed up from the south, from the area around the railway station at Chir and from Kotelnikovo, to try to break the encirclement. And the miracle happened – despite the harsh Russian winter, which up until then had thwarted all attempts by German commanders to undertake major offensives, Hoth’s advance was a complete success. In the face of intense cold and snow and fierce enemy resistance, the tank formations crept ever closer to the Cauldron. The spirits of the trapped men rose with every passing day. The talk was of relief, rest, recreation and leave. The staffs of the Sixth Army awoke from the slumber they’d lapsed into after receiving Hitler’s order to let themselves be encircled. While Hoth stormed forward, the plan was for the troops in the Cauldron to hit the Russians from behind like a ‘Thunderclap’. At least, that was the auspicious code name given to the operation that was being planned inside the Cauldron. The intention was for the army’s mobile forces, primarily the flak batteries, tanks and assault guns, to form into combat groups and break out to link up with the vanguard of the advancing Army Group Don.