Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

‘Lieutenant, sir – they want to… they’re trying to get our planes! They’re trying to dupe them so they crash-land over there!’

‘God damn it!’ exclaims the first lieutenant. ‘You’re right, man! We’ve got to… that is, what can we do?’

‘Fire into the air!’

‘Don’t be stupid! They won’t hear it up there. And we can’t get the artillery to do that…’

‘How about some flares of our own?’

‘Do you know what signals the air force uses? Well, then! What do you want to fire off?’

In the meantime, the drone of approaching aircraft has grown louder. One of the planes is circling, steadily losing height. The searchlight goes on again over there. This time it stays still, casting a broad cone of light over the snow. The lieutenant fires his pistol into the air, a futile gesture. Somewhere, a machine gun starts rattling away. All to no avail! The plane roars low over the heads of the two men, a huge dark shape, heading for the wide beam of light. And then it touches down, bounces a couple of times along the ground and rolls to a stop. It comes to a halt a few hundred metres in front of the railway embankment. A handful of white-clad figures emerge from the darkness and run towards the plane. The machine gun opens up again.

‘Hold your fire!’ bellows the Arse. ‘You’ll hit your own men!’

Several men clamber out of the aircraft, and are surrounded by the others. It all happens very calmly. Suddenly, the spotlight goes out. Soon after, a Russian artillery barrage forces the men on the embankment to retreat to their bunker.

The daily-worsening food situation began to sap the men’s morale. Despite the fact that the transport planes, even in the face of heavy losses, kept flying whenever the weather permitted, barely a quarter of the three hundred tons of vital supplies required made it into the Cauldron each day. Latterly, the horse carcasses lying by the sides of the roads had started to stand out blood-red from the snowdrifts, like predators had been gnawing at them. In actual fact, roving bands of Romanian soldiers or Russian auxiliary volunteers, crazed with hunger, had been eating them. All the stray dogs and cats that had once roamed around the camp gradually vanished; Lakosch didn’t let the portly Senta – whose belly grew larger by the day, attracting hungry looks – out of his sight for even a moment. He was ashamed of himself for having grown so foolishly fond of the dog, and for sharing his thin broth, which wasn’t remotely filling, with it, and for spending hours trying to find it a bone to gnaw on.

When Lakosch was alone, he’d often say to himself: ‘Right, that’s it! I’m going to get rid of that mutt!’ But when he gazed into the animal’s brown eyes, so full of grateful trust in him, his heart would melt; he’d stroke the dog’s ugly head, pat its brown flanks and tell himself and Senta: ‘That’s right, old girl, we’re going to stick together! Who else have we got, after all? Yes, yes, don’t you worry now! You can’t help it that you got mixed up in all this war business! None of this is your fault, that’s for sure!’

The divisional Staff HQ had been particularly hard hit by the general lack of food supplies, since it didn’t have any reserve stocks. First, it was one loaf of bread for six men… then one loaf between fourteen – and then twenty… a hundred grams of bread per man, a single slice as their daily ration. Add to that thirty grams of potted meat and every lunchtime, sometimes evenings too, a thin, watery soup with a bit of buckwheat semolina thrown in.

‘Christ Almighty!’ said Geibel, ‘I’d never have thought a person could live on so little.’

Secretly he speculated with horror on what would become of his business if this kind of subsistence food should ever become the norm in Germany. Up to now, his meaty face had lost little of its healthy vigour. But almost every night he dreamed he got into terrible arguments with his wife, who used force to stop him from devouring the entire stock of their delicatessen.

Sonderführer Fröhlich had become a dab hand at dividing the daily loaf among the men. Every morning witnessed a solemn ceremony, with all the occupants of the bunker looking on with rapt attention as he closed his left eye and, sighting with his right down the blade of the carefully sharpened knife, began to cut off slices with the precision of a surgeon wielding a scalpel. At the end of the process, Geibel would hold the results of Fröhlich’s artistry in his hand and marvel at what he saw. ‘Truly amazing, Sonderführer, five complete slices! I can’t manage that even with a piece of Edam.’

Fröhlich would then carefully toast the millimetre-thin slices on the little stove, filling the bunker with a heavenly smell. He’d proceed to spread them thinly with fat, and could spend hours nibbling with his long teeth at his own portion. The others weren’t nearly so patient, wolfing down their slices in the twinkling of an eye. It was only fortunate that they still had plenty of coffee, a good blend of beans, sweetened with saccharin from Geibel’s supplies.

One day Private Krüger, one of the mess orderlies, took Lakosch aside and pointed at the herd of shaggy ponies outside the camp, grazing on a few impertinent stems of steppe herb that had dared to poke their way up through the mantle of snow. He spoke quietly to the driver, reinforcing his words with extravagant hand gestures. Lakosch nodded thoughtfully and disappeared into the bunker. Soon after, he could be seen wandering aimlessly out over the plain. Senta ran ahead of him, snuffling round the half-eroded foxholes dating from the time when the Russians were here. Seemingly quite innocently, Lakosch sidled up to the sentry, who was standing, his rifle under his arm, on the small knoll that he used as a convenient vantage point to survey the herd in his charge, which belonged to an infantry division from the northern sector. A little further on, three Russian prisoners sat chatting around a campfire. They appeared to be Hilfswillige (or ‘ Hiwis’ for short, as the German troops called them), [1] Hilfswillige – ‘Auxiliary Volunteers’. After the early successes of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, thousands of captured Ukrainian and Russian soldiers volunteered to fight against Stalin’s regime by providing assistance to the German forces in non-combat roles, especially engineering and logistics. who’d been sent out there to help the sentry. They didn’t seem to be taking their task very seriously. Anyhow, the half-starved ponies, barely able to keep themselves from falling over, certainly wouldn’t run away.

‘Mornin’,’ Lakosch greeted the sentry. ‘Pretty brassy today, eh?’

The man shot him a mistrustful sideways glance and muttered something under his breath. Lakosch tried to act indifferent. He took out his cigarette case, which he’d just taken the precaution of filling with the daily tobacco rations of all the mess orderlies, and made great play of lighting one up for himself. The sentry looked over at him, his interest rekindled.

‘Still so many fags?’ he asked, astonished. ‘You’re in clover all right!’

‘S’pose so,’ answered Lakosch. ‘Ten cigarettes a day, that just about does at a pinch. Sometimes there’s even cigars. You get more of them.’

He nonchalantly offered the guard the open cigarette case. The man dipped in eagerly.

‘Ten smokes a day, you say?’ he marvelled. ‘We’ve only been getting three for the past week or so… And to think I was a twenty-a-day man before that!’

He dragged greedily on his cigarette.

‘In fact, it’s pretty shitty in general for us, I don’t mind telling you. We’ve even taken to eating our own horses!’