Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

When the Russian infantry subsequently stormed the position, they encountered virtually no resistance at this sector of the front. A scattered handful of troops who still put up a fight were quickly wiped out. While all this was happening, the massed Russian tanks, which left their forward assembly positions in the woods and, rumbling past their own lines, went straight on to the attack, managed to penetrate deep into enemy territory.

Lieutenant Colonel Unold was woken by an urgent radio message from the Panzer Corps. The telephone connection to the Corps, which ran for the best part of forty kilometres, had been cut again.

‘Enemy attacking along whole length of the Romanian front since first light, with strong support from artillery and tank units,’ he read. ‘Situation unclear at present. Isolated tank breakthroughs are to be expected. Division taking up assigned initial position in the rear of First Romanian Cavalry division, centred on Hill 218, ready to launch counter-thrust against enemy incursions.’

‘What did I tell you!’ said Unold, handing the message to Captain Engelhard. ‘We need to get our skates on now, though! Give Kallweit and Lunitz their orders to go into action!’ (Major Kallweit led the division’s remaining thirty tanks, while Colonel Lunitz was the commander of the artillery regiment.) ‘Really outstanding intelligence they’ve provided us with, mind!’ he added angrily. ‘“Situation unclear!” What are we supposed to do with that! Try and get hold of the Romanian Corps again, will you?’

‘The line’s been down for the last two hours,’ the captain replied laconically, stepping into his tank-crew trousers.

‘Radio them, then!’

‘Radio? The Romanians?’ Engelhard gave a pitying smile. ‘We don’t have a radio connection with the Romanians!’

‘Christ Almighty, it’s enough to drive you crazy!’ the lieutenant colonel exploded. ‘What are we doing sitting around here, then? Schmalfuß, get me my car, and be quick about it!’

‘What, does the Lieutenant Colonel intend to go—?’ Engelhard started to ask in amazement. This would be the first time that a chief of staff had ever left the command post during an engagement.

‘Yes, I’ll drive myself over there!’ Unold shouted at him before he could finish. ‘I want to see for myself what’s going on. Or do you think the general’s about to give us the intelligence we need?’

Captain Engelhard thought nothing of the sort. But since he could hardly respond to that effect, he thought it better to keep quiet. As he was leaving, Unold ran into First Lieutenant Breuer.

‘You’re to accompany the general!’ Unold called out in passing. ‘Make sure that you— Oh, you know what to do!’

The two staff cars, with the commanding officer’s black, white and red pennants on the bonnet, drove first to the Romanian staff headquarters at Platonov. The general, wearing an elegant fur coat and his peaked cap with gold braid, sat up front next to the driver of the large, grey Horch limousine and, wreathed in the smoke of a fat Brazilian cigar, said nothing throughout the trip. Breuer, whom the general had not even deigned to acknowledge, had made himself comfortable on the leather upholstery of the back seat. The briefing given by the staff of the First Romanian Cavalry Division had been pretty sketchy.

‘It’s astonishing,’ the German liaison officer explained during the meeting, ‘how the Russians managed to bring up all those artillery pieces completely unnoticed. In front of our sector, all the attacks they’ve attempted so far without tank support have been repulsed. But on the sector on our left, which it appears bore the brunt of this assault, the enemy seems to have succeeded in breaking through. We don’t know anything more at present. We don’t have a direct telephone link to that sector, and the line to our Corps has been down since this morning.’

‘Of course it has,’ grumbled the general angrily.

‘Besides, it’s of no concern to us.’

They continued driving. The two staff cars overtook a few small columns of motorized units with lorries and artillery that were slowly making their way towards the battle zone, and headed on towards point 218.

Sonderführer Fröhlich had gone to a great deal of trouble arranging the film show. A large canvas screen had been stretched across the nave of the church, and they’d run the accompanying newsreel as a test to get the picture sharp and the sound balanced to perfection. Now Fröhlich was sitting in his quarters waiting for Breuer and Unold to return. With him was Captain Endrigkeit, whose military police unit was there to keep order among the crowd that was massing outside the makeshift cinema. He had undone his coat and was busy puffing away on his lidded pipe, smoking the Russian green wild tobacco called makhorka , whose spicy aroma he’d developed quite a taste for. He poured himself a fifth cup of coffee from the steaming pot. And, to Herbert’s dismay, the golden-yellow sponge cake – the most accomplished of miracles that had ever been performed on the lid of a mess tin – kept dwindling. To add insult to injury, the captain was so engrossed in his discussion with Fröhlich that he hadn’t even praised Herbert’s baking skills. They’d chatted about home and their last spell on leave, and now they’d got on to talking about the war.

‘Look here,’ Endrigkeit said in measured tones, ‘I’m not saying anything against the war. There’s always been wars in the past and there’ll continue to be wars in the future…’

With a slight sense of unease, he recalled that, many long years ago, he’d argued quite the opposite. Back then, in 1918, when he returned home still feeling the artillery barrage at Saint-Mihiel in his bones, he – like everyone else at the time – had only one thought in his head: Never again. No more war. And now, despite themselves, they’d slipped back into fighting another one.

Slipped right back into it, despite all their good intentions. It had begun quite slowly, harmlessly and amiably. A revision of the Treaty of Versailles? That seemed fair and peaceable. The other nations were forthcoming, and Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Klaipeda region fell into Germany’s lap like ripe apples from a tree. How about teaching the Poles a lesson? Granted! If one were to believe Goebbels, they really had grown far too impertinent. And when everything was said and done, all it had been was a ‘police action’. The other nations were on high alert, after all! It could all have ended after the fall of Warsaw and the fortress at Modlin. People took no notice of declarations of war on paper. Still, they were at war now and so it was to remain. Yet when France – that same France they’d once sweated blood over for four years, attempting, in vain, to conquer – collapsed in an instant like it had been hit by lightning, this had calmed their nerves. That Hitler really was a force of nature! He’d wangled victory over France without a repeat of Verdun or the Battle of the Somme or a winter of hardship and hunger like they’d suffered in 1916–17. It had all come so easily, almost without casualties. The handful of dead, whose numbers he’d sometimes tot up, nice and neatly, hardly counted. At the beginning, it was hard to take seriously what they were so grandiosely calling ‘war’. Until this business with Russia flared up, that is… Endrigkeit could still vividly recall his shock when he’d heard the radio broadcasting the unthinkable news. There was something uncanny about this campaign from day one. Though there had been lightning successes at first in Russia, too, the advance still moved too slowly for the vastness of the space there. Where were they going to call a halt? At Stalingrad? At the Urals? Or only when they reached Vladivostok? Then they suffered some setbacks, like the dreadful winter of 1941, and that unholy mess outside Moscow… No more fanfares rang out, and for some time now the German news had given up reporting casualty figures. Quite unexpectedly, God damn it, they’d gone from a smooth succession of breezy ‘campaigns’ to being bogged down in the most unwieldy of world wars, and no one knew quite how and why.