Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

Woken by a searing pain in his side, caused by an elbow jabbed into his ribs, Geibel gave a start.

‘I’ll give you “Help!”, you bastard!’ Lakosch thundered at him. ‘Your bloody raving’s got the rest of us wide awake now – and that damned phone’s been ringing itself off the hook, too!’

On cue, the ringing began again. It was coming from the telephone that Geibel always placed next to his bed overnight. He noticed with astonishment that he was already holding the receiver in his hand.

‘Division Ic office, Private Rembrandt here!’ he announced, still all in a fluster. Lakosch was seized by a fit of laughter, at which Corporal Herbert, who was still trying to sleep, angrily shushed him.

‘Good evening, you halfwit!’ replied the voice at the other end of the line. ‘Sergeant Schmalfuß here, from Staff HQ. First Lieutenant Breuer is to report to this division forthwith, and to be ready to decamp straight away! Without his staff car!’

‘First Lieutenant Breuer to report immediately to “Ia”, no staff car!’ Geibel repeated mechanically. ‘What, in the middle of the night?’ he added, perplexed. ‘How come? What’s up then?’

‘Stop talking such drivel!’ the voice snapped at him. ‘Firstly, it’s eight in the morning. And secondly, I’ll tell you what’s up. The Russians are attacking, that’s what!’

Geibel was wide awake in an instant. Without more ado, he slammed the receiver back on the cradle, leaped up and ran into the adjoining room.

‘Get up!’ he shouted, ‘Get up, Lieutenant, sir! The Russians are attacking!’

‘Okay, okay,’ yawned First Lieutenant Breuer. ‘I got the message. No need to go yelling it like that.’

So, it’s happened, he thought to himself in his semi-conscious state. One-nil to the Romanians! He dressed with more than usual haste and, without pausing to sit, gulped down a cup of cold tea, while Lakosch quickly spread a couple of slices of bread with tinned liver sausage for them to take with them.

‘Just our luck that it’s kicking off today, of all days!’ Breuer called out as he was leaving. ‘Try to get hold of that film again, Herr Fröhlich! We’ll probably be back long before five.’

The morning light slowly ate its way through the dense patches of fog lying over the Don and the range of hills around Kletskaya. The broad expanse of snow shone white, cut through at many points by the black-brown tracks and ribbons of road and the poorly constructed Romanian trenches. From under their tarpaulins the lookouts in the machine-gun nests peered out with bored expressions across the barbed-wire entanglements at the shifting, milky-white fog banks. In this half-light, their view towards the Don only extended barely a hundred metres. The night had passed off quietly. Even now, a deep silence lay over the enemy lines. No shots, no voices, no sound of engines. After all, who in their right mind would want to wage war in weather like this?

Chilled to the bone and glad of the freedom of movement that the blanket of fog afforded them, the first infantrymen crept out of their bunkers and foxholes, clapped their arms around their bodies like coachmen and ran up and down the field for a stretch, taking short steps on the snowy ground. Before long, little clusters of them were standing around outside the trenches, smoking and chatting. Letting off steam, getting their annoyance off their chests.

The situation was this: the Romanian divisions were only sent on six-monthly tours of duty to the Eastern Front. The Romanian Army High Command could not expect their soldiers, who were less than enthusiastic about fighting here anyhow, to put up with a longer deployment. For quite some time now, it had been intended that the infantry division manning the central section of the front at Kletskaya should be relieved on the eighteenth of November. For weeks, the troops had been longing for that day to come. Their thoughts were no longer in the dreadful here and now, far from home, but were already flying back home to their wives and children, to the fertile lowlands of the Dobruja region, the wild Carpathian forests, or the joys of easy-going Bucharest. Due to some problem or other with transport, however, the division that was supposed to relieve them had not yet arrived. But as the result of an error on the part of German supply points, all the provisions that were destined to go to the troops waiting to be relieved had instead been sent to the new division. No wonder, then, that the men here were swearing the whole time, cursing the miserable food, the appalling Russian winter – which they were now going to have to endure part of, after all – and about this lousy war, which they hadn’t wanted to happen and which wasn’t their fight.

There! Suddenly the air fills with a sinister and eerie hissing and whizzing sound. Cries of fear and shouts of alarm ring out. And then, in an instant, the storm is upon them. All of a sudden, a forest of flames erupts from the rumbling ground, and a hailstorm of shrapnel comes whistling towards them, as clouds of sulphurous smoke billow across the plain. So sudden is this attack, and so unexpected in the sluggish stillness of the morning, that even the front-line troops’ keen antennae for trouble are of no use. Only a handful of the men, standing around with no inkling of what’s about to happen, heed the threatening hum and dive for cover in time. The rest are scythed down even before they realize what’s happening.

The bombardment grows in intensity, with the countless Stalin organs being joined by weapons of every calibre. Fountains of earth burst upwards, forming a wall that then comes crashing down on the minefield in front of their position, setting off the charges, shredding the barbed-wire entanglements, burying trenches and machine-gun nests, and whipping up a maelstrom of pieces of wood, weapons and human body parts, before rolling on to the rearward artillery positions. All to the accompaniment of a terrible seething, roaring, howling and cracking sound… The very ground on which they are standing, torn and lacerated, flinches under the hellish onslaught of material. What a piece of work is man…!

The artillery barrage lasts for about an hour and a half before breaking off just as abruptly as it began. A few stray shells still occasionally putter across the sky and explode somewhere further behind the lines. When the clouds of smoke disperse, the landscape lies there, torn open like a field ploughed up by a giant’s hands. There’s not much left of the Romanians’ positions. Dead bodies are strewn around everywhere, and the silence that suddenly ensues is filled with the sound of the wounded shrieking and moaning.

The survivors in their foxholes claw their hands into the damp earth, press their contorted faces into the clay, conscious that hell could break loose again at any moment. Their brains start working again, and to a man they all have just the one thought: We’d already put all of that behind us, our homeland was already beckoning! And now, right at the very last, we’re supposed to die a miserable death for these puffed-up swastika lovers? And in a flash, with no words being spoken, this thought generates an equally snap decision: Let’s get out of this hellhole right now! Let’s save our own lives at all costs! And they leap to their feet, one by one at first, then in groups. Chuck away our weapons and any other encumbrances! Fall back! And like rabbits, off they hop across the plain, between the brown heaps of earth thrown up by the shelling, falling over, struggling to their feet again and disappearing in the fog. Here and there, an officer shouts and gesticulates wildly at them, shooting in the direction of the fleeing men with his pistol. But what can you do when faced with people’s will to live? So, ultimately, the officers are reduced to doing something they’ve never done before, but that remains the only thing to be done in these circumstances: follow their men.