Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Eichert wakes with a start of terror. Looming over him he sees the face of his adjutant, who is shaking him by the shoulders.

‘Captain!’ he shouts in alarm. ‘Captain, sir!’

‘Yes… what… how… yes? What’s the matter?’

‘Captain, sir, there’s a sound of fighting coming from the left sector, and it’s growing louder! Seems like it’s all kicked off down there!’

The battalion commander is already on his feet, cursing.

‘On the left, you say? Dierk’s sector?’

The field telephone rings and he picks up the receiver. It’s Lieutenant Dierk on the line and he’s very het up.

‘I wanted to call you straight away, Captain! It’s a real mess down here… the Russians have broken through, they caught us with our pants down…No, I haven’t got a clear overview of the situation yet… The anti-tank gun on the left isn’t firing any more. And on the right? We’ve locked that down as best we can, sir.’

‘I’ll be down there myself right away, Dierk!’ says the captain. He hangs up and calls the regiment. The answer he receives isn’t encouraging. The battalion must deal with the breakthrough as quickly as they can with their own resources.

The captain manages to secure the services of a handful of older, more experienced troops from one of the other two companies. With their help, Lieutenant Dierk is to drive the Russians back from their positions at daybreak the next day. The lieutenant, though, is in total despair.

‘That won’t do any good, Captain!’ he declares. ‘The Russians have made a really major breakthrough. And they appear to be constantly reinforcing as we speak. There’s no hope of us plugging the gap without some stronger forces of our own!’

The captain shrugs his shoulders. He too has little faith that the operation will succeed. But in the event, the planned counter-attack never takes place. The next morning – with a fifth of the battalion already incapacitated by frostbite – the Russians launch a large-scale assault of the kind the division has become increasingly accustomed to in the last few weeks across the entire sector controlled by the regiment. The attack is executed with extensive armoured and artillery support. Colonel Steigmann’s curtain-fire system inflicts heavy losses on the enemy. Four waves of attacking troops are beaten back. Only the fifth wave finally succeeds, as evening falls, in widening and deepening the area that has been breached. Several Russian tanks break through and cause havoc in the artillery emplacements.

All that Captain Eichert can salvage from his battalion the following morning is a group of around forty men and two officers. For the third time, the ‘Eichert Battalion’ has ceased to exist.

Göring had done what he could. It wasn’t what he had promised. No convoys of heavy transport gliders flew to Stalingrad by moonlight; but alongside the old ‘corrugated-iron’ Ju 52s, which suffered heavy losses, a few of the more modern Heinkel He 111 bombers put in an appearance. In addition to the cargo they carried in their fuselages, they could also transport food in their bomb bays and petrol in their tanks. A few obsolete Ju 86s – a type now consigned to a training role in Germany – were even pressed into service. Now and then, the troops trapped in the Stalingrad pocket would lift their heads and stare in wonder as a large, four-engined machine approached and circled majestically over the aerodrome at Pitomnik. These were either Focke-Wulf Condors, hastily redeployed from the south of France, or Ju 90s, which came straight from Sicily and were still being flown by the factory’s own pilots. Although these heavy transports had a payload of around five tons apiece, their principal effect was on morale, for only a handful of these showpiece aircraft were sent on the Stalingrad run at any one time, and even these presently came to grief while attempting to land on or take off from the snow-swept airfield. The food situation had by now become critical. Two hundred grams of bread a day for an infantryman in the trenches, and one hundred grams for everyone else. The horses were all skin and bone, and the cavalry captain from the First Romanian Cavalry Division who had been so concerned about his equine charges back in Businovka could surely never have dreamed that every last one of them would one day end up in the pots of German field kitchens. All that now remained of their carcasses were the bleached white bones protruding from the snow beside every road. Russian prisoners, starving Romanian soldiers and the hordes of wounded men who drifted from hospital to hospital in hope of admission had picked them clean in their desperation.

Hunger was also rife in the Intelligence Section’s bunker. Fröhlich’s head steadily shrivelled and began to take on the unappealing look of a vulture, Herbert had lost all interest in the business of cooking and flew off the handle if anyone quizzed him about it, and even the well-padded Geibel started to become visibly more emaciated. Breuer, though, who had never fully recovered from his bout of dysentery, observed with alarm how day by day not only his physical strength appeared to wane but also that his mental powers were increasingly deserting him. It was only with the greatest of effort that he was able to concentrate on his work.

To make matters worse, a real stinker had been lying in his in-tray for the past few days. In the confusion at the time of the Russian breakthrough, some secret documents had gone missing from the supply train of the Tank Destroyer Division, and Captain Eichert, who had an insuperable aversion to all forms of paperwork, had asked Breuer to draft the necessary reports on the matter. In the meantime, the Tank Destroyer Division had long since ceased to exist. Despite this, he had just received the fourth itemized request from Corps HQ asking him to explain:

a) Why the papers were being stored in the supply train in the first place.

b) Whether, and if so by whom, the driver of the lorry in question had been informed about the confidentiality provisions concerning his load.

c) How it came to be that, among the secret orders, there were still certain papers dating from the time of the French campaign, notwithstanding the fact that, in compliance with Army Ordinance XY HV sheet number so-and-so, these should have been destroyed by the summer of 1942.

d) Why the driver, assuming that he had, as noted under query b), been apprised of the situation, had not made every effort to defend the truck containing the secret documents or, if this had not proved possible, why he had not destroyed it.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Breuer swore as he read the message. ‘Seems like the old nag of Prussian bureaucracy keeps on galloping even when all its riders have already kicked the bucket. Do you know what I feel like writing back to them, Wiese? I’ll tell them to—’

‘Just say: “The driver is dead. There are strong indications that he was driven to suicide by incessant questioning on the part of the army!”’ suggested Wiese.

Wiese is just in the process of buckling up his belt. His company commander has ordered him to report to him on official business. Just as he’s about to set off, Geibel, who has been washing his hands in the snow outside, sticks his head into the bunker.

‘Quick, Lieutenant Breuer!’ he calls excitedly. ‘Come quickly! Something’s going on out here!’

The two officers rush out into the glaring light of day. It’s one of those clear, frosty days on which the super-chilled air shimmers with tiny ice crystals when it is caught in the rays of the sun. ‘There, there!’ hollers Geibel, pointing ahead. ‘Now he really has got him… bugger it!’ A few hundred metres away, where the plain begins to rise to the north, a large transport aircraft, a Ju 52, is skimming close to the ground, trailing a plume of blackish-brown smoke behind it. It staggers like a bird with an injured wing, and the frantic drone of its engines cuts out intermittently. There is a sudden flash of silver-white above. A nimble Russian fighter dives one more time like a hawk on the stricken plane, delivering the coup de grâce with a short burst of machine-gun fire. The Junkers pancakes onto the uneven ground, smashing its undercarriage with a loud crunch, and the large grey-green fuselage buckets across the snow for a short distance before finally coming to rest heeled over in a dip. The fighter banks steeply over the crash site to make sure of its ‘kill’ and then disappears with a flash of white into the blue yonder.