Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Taking all these factors into consideration, therefore,’ Milch concluded, ‘we need a transport fleet of some two hundred and fifty to three hundred aircraft. If the air supply operation were to last longer than anticipated – earlier, there’d been talk of the spring of 1943 – the fleet would have to be resupplied with new planes on a running basis to make up for the losses. And so, for the reasons already mentioned, it is currently not possible to prepare and muster such a large number of transport aircraft.’

‘Thank God for that!’ thought General Wagner. But the next utterance from around the table caused him visibly to wince.

‘It must be possible!’ said a harsh, guttural voice. All faces turned to the figure at the head of the table. These were the first words that Hitler had spoken in this meeting. The officers present who had not seen the Führer for some time noted with alarm that he was no longer the great magician he had once been. His face was grey, while his permanently slightly stooped back looked positively deformed today. White hairs had begun to appear in his Charlie Chaplin moustache, and his temples were greying noticeably too. Never before had this deity seemed so pathetically human to them. Only the eyes, which bespoke a dangerous fixation, gleamed as brightly as ever from beneath his bushy brows. Even Field Marshal Milch, whose frequent contact with the godlike figure had made him immune to any sensation of mystical awe, flinched at the sound of this voice and fell silent. For several months, aircraft production in the Reich had been unable to keep pace with the losses, and it was he who’d had to shoulder the blame. He was desperate to make amends. Had he taken his eye off the ball? Had he said too much? He cowered like a frightened rabbit beneath the gaze of a snake. Others in the room took up the baton. Manstein spoke briefly and to the point, while the old-fashioned Baron von Weichs beat about the bush with any number of ifs and buts. But to a man they all, some in carefully guarded terms, others plainly and soberly, concurred that it would be an impossible undertaking.

‘I managed to supply six divisions in the Demyansk Pocket,’ rasped the feared voice once more, this time more ominously. ‘That was in the face of opposition from my so-called experts, too. Yet we pulled it off all the same. There’s no such thing as “impossible” for us!’

General Wagner was not a religious man; he was an everyday kind of person who believed in reason. But at this point even he clasped his hands together in prayer under the table and repeated the words under his breath: ‘Dear Lord, deliver us from evil!’ The Sixth Army was lost, and with it the war. They were running with eyes wide open headlong to destruction. ‘Retreat!’ he wanted to scream. ‘Pull the army out and withdraw to Donetsk! It’s our only hope! It’s still not too late!’ But he didn’t open his mouth and shout it. Why not? Instead, he looked across the table at the wan, inscrutable face of Jeschonnek, as if some salvation might still come from that quarter. General Jeschonnek sat there motionless, with his thin line of a mouth drawn together even tighter than before. He was tapping a pencil gently on the table. He was remembering the pocket at Demyansk. Six divisions had been encircled there, not twenty-two like now. To get enough transport capacity to supply even that force, they’d had to close the flying schools. In addition, the Luftwaffe was now hamstrung by a shortage of newly qualified pilots. Sure, they’d succeeded in freeing the bottled-up forces then – but at the cost of more troops killed than the number of those trapped.

‘How about you, Jeschonnek?’

The colonel general raised his eyes slowly. His gaze passed over Göring, who was glaring at him like a furious sergeant major, and came to rest, earnestly and calmly, on the glowering face of Hitler. The Führer’s anger knew no bounds if anyone ever dared to contradict him. He tore down curtains and dashed inkwells to the ground. Jeschonnek was all too familiar with these outbursts, and was perhaps the only person who did not go in fear of them.

‘The best will in the world can’t help if the material wherewithal is lacking,’ he said, barely moving his lips. ‘Weighing up all the various factors, it’s clear that dropping enough supplies to the Sixth Army by air just isn’t feasible. I for one am not in a position where I could take responsibility for that.’

You could have heard a pin drop. Only General Wagner, normally a model of composure, shifted uneasily in his chair. Now was the time for him to speak up, surely! He still hadn’t uttered a word, nor had anyone asked his opinion. Why didn’t he just say something? Hitler’s grey face, to which everyone’s eyes were glued once more, flushed momentarily, and an evil gleam appeared in his watery blue eyes.

‘Is that all that my generals have to tell me, then?’

It was indeed. The generals had come out in opposition to Hitler, tentatively for sure, but unanimously all the same. Hitler, the all-powerful, had been deposed. A new, stronger force had overcome all feelings of dependency and now held sway over the room, where a heavy atmosphere prevailed, like someone had poured lead into the space – the force of circumstances. Suddenly, Göring sprang to his feet. He stood there, a monstrous mountain of flesh with the gold-bordered Grand Cross of the Iron Cross dangling from the collar of his buttoned-up white dress jacket.

‘My Führer!’ he barked, his puffy, jowly face turning puce. ‘My Führer, there is no such thing as “impossible” for us! We’ll build… in fact, Willy Messerschmitt is already building giant gliders and powered transport aircraft! Milch, this is your department! You’re building us giant planes, you’ll show what we can do! At night… we’ll fly huge air convoys in to Stalingrad by moonlight! We’ll… my Führer, I can guarantee that the Sixth Army will be resupplied!’

It’s late at night. Sergeant Major Harras is back in the company CO’s bunker again, playing Skat. The Arse has just declared a ‘Grand’ with all four jacks in his hand. Suddenly, footsteps are heard clumping down the ladder and the door is thrown open. The sentry stands in the doorway.

‘Lieutenant, sir! Come quickly! Something’s not right out here!

And with that he disappears again.

‘I don’t get it,’ mutters the Arse. ‘It’s all quiet out there. I propose we carry on with the game after I’ve seen what’s up!’

He puts down his cards and, with an irritated sigh, hitches up the belt of his grey-brown corduroy trousers, drapes his fur coat round his shoulders, clambers out of the bunker and climbs to the top of the railway embankment. Sergeant Major Harras follows him. The night is bitterly cold. The stars are shining in the pitch-black sky, and low on the horizon is the reddish disc of the waxing moon. The front is quiet, uncannily quiet. Only the sound of transport planes coming and going fills the frost-tingling air.

‘There’s nothing going on. Quiet as the grave.’ says the first lieutenant, and turns to leave.

At that moment, over on the enemy front line, a flare goes up. The bright point of light pirouettes up into the darkness and bursts into a cascade of individual red stars, which for a second or two bathe the landscape in the dull red light of a photographer’s darkroom before falling slowly to earth and fizzling out, one after the other.

‘That’s one of our flares, though,’ says Harras in astonishment. ‘Since when have the Russians been using those?’

‘Dunno,’ replies the Arse, who’s bored and thinking of his game of Skat. ‘Some new trick of theirs, no doubt.’

Then a searchlight is switched on over at the enemy lines. Slowly, it arcs in a semicircle across the snowy expanse. For an instant, the light tries to pick out the two men standing on the embankment, who quickly throw themselves to the ground. But everything remains quiet. Harras hesitates… Then the whole performance begins anew. He’s seen something like this before from his bunker overlooking the aerodrome at Pitomnik! A sudden hot flush of shock passes through him. Ignoring all protocol, he grabs his commanding officer’s arm and shakes him violently.