War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01]

by David Robbins

  By early afternoon, Nikki had walked six kilometers past the grain silos. The growing concentration of men kicking aimlessly through the powder and tanks with snowy faces told him he was nearing the southern frontier of the Sixth Army’s hedgehog formation. Some of the men strung barbed wire. Others knifed through the weather on their way to a tent or a trench, or just to keep moving, Nikki could not tell.

  Doom, he thought. It thickens with the snow, it darkens with the hours. It grows on these men’s faces like beards.

  He approached a group gathered around an oil drum holding a wood fire.

  “Is there a lot of action here?” he asked.

  A soldier looked straight into the fire.

  “What do you mean by ‘action’? Fighting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure, there’s plenty of action. We fight the cold, the lice, the shits, hunger, each other.”

  The man looked south across the open, glistening land where Russians were massed behind the veil of wind-driven snow.

  “And yeah, we fight them when they want. Where you from?”

  Nikki nodded his head behind him, to the north.

  “Downtown,” he said.

  “Oh, fuck. You’ve seen it. What are you doing here?”

  “Walking.”

  The soldier’s smile lifted the blond stubble on his cheeks. “Yeah.”

  Nikki took off his mittens to hold his hands close to the jumping flames in the barrel.

  “Have the Reds taken many prisoners?”

  “You mean,” the soldier said, “do the Reds take prisoners?”

  Nikki nodded.

  “Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Depends on how mad they are that day. Usually they’re pretty mad. You can hear them going crazy, screaming and shooting at prisoners, guys who’ve dropped their guns and put their hands in the air. The Rumanians west of here are getting hammered. It’s nasty. I saw it, and I ran back here and I’m staying here. I’d rather starve, thank you. Fucking Russians. It isn’t right.”

  “They’ve got a reason to be mad,” Nikki said.

  The man spat into the fire. It hissed quickly and was gone.

  Nikki reached under his parka to his inside pocket for the envelope containing his orders. The papers were stamped Intelligence. Nikki remained assigned to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s unit of gatherers and listeners. He was cleared to go anywhere on the battlefield unescorted. He put his mittens on and clutched the envelope. He wanted the papers ready now.

  Nikki turned from the fire to look south to the Russian lines. The cold slapped his cheeks. He pulled the canvas muffler over his mouth and nose. He spoke to the man beside him through the wrapping. The cloth caught his breath and warmed his lips.

  “I’m a dairy farmer,” he called through the freezing wind and the crackling of the fire. “From Westphalia.”

  Nikki walked into the whirling white.

  * * * *

  EPILOGUE

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF JANUARY 8, 1943, THE RUSSIAN forces manning the Cauldron around Stalingrad paused in their liquidation of the encircled Sixth Army to await the results of a surrender offer tendered by the Russian command to the commander of the German forces, General Friedrich von Paulus. The terms of surrender were generous, accompanied by a promise from Stalin to annihilate the Sixth Army if it continued to resist. The next day, the offer was refused and the battle resumed.

  The decision to reject the Russian proposal was made not on the scene by Paulus but by Adolf Hitler from his Wolf’s Lair castle in East Prussia. Anyone who had seen firsthand the suffering of the Sixth Army could not have asked them to fight another day.

  Hitler determined that Paulus and his emaciated, shivering troops would remain in “Fortress Stalingrad.” They would be a tragic but strategic sacrifice, one necessary to tie down Russian forces and allow the remnants of Army Group Don under Manstein and Sixth Army Group B near Rostov, commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, to retreat north. Hitler correctly feared the resurgent strength of the Red Army, and he needed Manstein in place to bar the coming Red advance.

  At 0805 the morning of January 10, the Russians renewed their attack on the Cauldron in a massive action, triggered by an hour of artillery bombardment blanketing the German positions. At precisely 0900, a thousand Russian tanks and waves of fresh infantry leaped into the fray. The ring drew tighter by the hour. The Reds knifed into the Nazi forces, reclaiming in a single day hundreds of square kilometers that it had taken the invaders months to conquer. German infantry and motorized divisions fought bravely but without stamina. Their resistance shattered quickly.

  Throughout January, German soldiers surrendered in groups of thousands. Appearing more like ragged scarecrows than men, they stumbled out of the mists and swirling snows, hands behind their heads, weapons dropped at their feet. Scraps of cloth bound their heads and boots. Starvation bulged in their darting eyes.

  Despite the pitiful condition of the surrendering enemy troops, many of the Reds could not relinquish their burning hatred for the Nazis. Their anger had been stoked white hot by the invasion of their homeland, news of the Nazis’ cruelty in the occupied territories, the terrible, ongoing siege of Leningrad, and the rhetoric of loathing spread incessantly by the Communist agitators. Each Russian bore the pain of the rodina in the same hands he carried his machine gun.

  Entire companies of Germans, Rumanians, Hungarians, and Italians were mowed down without remorse while they advanced under white flags. The murdering Russian units went unpunished, receiving the tacit and vengeful sanction of their generals and of Stalin to exterminate the enemy. By the third week of January, the Sixth Army, which two months earlier had numbered over three hundred thousand, had been massacred—starved, frozen, and hacked—to less than ninety thousand men.

  On January 30, Hitler wired General Paulus that he had been promoted to the rank of field marshal, knowing that no German field marshal had ever surrendered his forces in battle. Hitler hoped that his beleaguered commander would take the hint and commit suicide, salvaging what Hitler deemed to be one final, heroic act. Paulus did not shoot himself; instead, before dawn, he surrendered to a young Russian lieutenant, Fyodor Yelchenko, who sat in a tank outside Sixth Army headquarters in the decimated Univermag department store, pointing his turret directly into Paulus’s window.

  All organized German resistance in Stalingrad ended on February 2. Massive columns of prisoners streamed north out of the city. The captives shuffled across the Volga through blinding snow, then east to holding camps. Those who could not keep up with the march received a bullet in the skull from NKVD guards and were left beside the road.

  The lines of prisoners passed through small villages untouched by the war. Though the Red Army had stopped the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, the citizens east of the Volga displayed their hatred for the Germans as if they themselves had been in the grim battles. Old men and women broke into the prisoners’ limping ranks to slap at them or steal from them lighters, fountain pens, packs, hoarded bits of food, even writing paper. In several instances, Russian soldiers guarding the towns vented their wrath by firing indiscriminately into the trudging columns.

  Bivouacs for the prisoners were set up along the way, rarely more than hastily-thrown-up tents, drafty barns, or windowless factory rooms. Straw was strewn on the ground for bedding. Each morning, fewer prisoners rose to continue the march east. Many of the men died in the night from starvation and cold. Typhus also struck them down, contracted from the lice riding in their crevices.

  Finally, the survivors were loaded onto trucks and driven to labor camps across Siberia.

  At the outset of the German invasion, Stalin had relocated many Soviet industries east of the Ural mountains. These factories needed rail links to the western half of the nation. The Axis prisoners were given inhuman burdens of labor, bending their backs over picks, shovels, and sledgehammers twelve hours a day in bitter Siberian weather. They went into tunnels to set dynamite charges. They split boulders and loaded the rocks
onto truck beds or built retaining walls into the carved-away sides of mountains. Often at night, they were lectured by Communists about the evils of their governments and fascism. Many of the captives appeared to turn against their countries to cheer for world socialism. The louder they bellowed, the less cruel was their treatment. Doctors, nurses, food, clothes, even mail and some news appeared as the years moved past, making it plain that the Russians wanted some prisoners left alive to use for chips on the postwar world’s political gaming tables.

  Not until 1948 did Russia release its first Stalingrad prisoners. The political pressures of the Cold War served to slow the repatriations to a trickle. Nonetheless, by 1954, only two thousand Germans remained in Siberian prison camps. These were men whom Premier Nikita Khrushchev identified not as prisoners of war but “war criminals,” men who had been tried and sentenced by Soviet tribunals for atrocities against the Russian people. After painstaking negotiations, these men, too, were finally amnestied and released.

  Of the million and a quarter invading soldiers who rode across the Russian steppe to the gates of Stalingrad in August of 1942, fewer than thirty thousand ever returned to their homelands.

  * * * *

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The author wishes to recognize and recommend the following historical works on Russia and the Battle of Stalingrad:

  Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942—1943. Viking, 1998.

  Chuikov, Vasili I., The Battle for Stalingrad. Trans. H. Silver. Holt, Rinehart and

  Winston, 1964.

  Clark, Alan, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941—45. William Morrow,

  1965.

  Craig, William, Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. Reader’s Digest Press,

  1973.

  Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army

  Stopped Hitler. University Press of Kansas, 1995.

  Jukes, Geoffrey, Stalingrad: The Turning Point. Ballantine Books, 1968.

  Keegan, John, The Second World War. Penguin Books, 1989.

  Schroter, Heinz, Stalingrad. Trans. C. Fitzgibbon. E. P. Dutton, 1958.

  Seth, R., Stalingrad: Point of Return. Coward-McCann, 1959.

  Shipler, David K., Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams. Times Books, 1983.

  Tantum, William, Sniper Rifles of Two Wars. Historical Arms Series no. 8. Museum

  Restoration Service, 1967.

  Two Hundred Days of Fire: Accounts by Participants and Witnesses of the Battle of

  Stalingrad. Progress Publishers, 1970.

  Werth, Alexander, Russia at War, 1941-1945. E. P. Dutton, 1964.

  -----------------------. The Year of Stalingrad. H. Hamilton, 1946.

  Zaitsev, Vasily, Za Volgoi zemli dlia nas ne bylo (For us, there was no land beyond

  the Volga). Moscow, 1971.

  Fedya’s poem, “The Washing River,” is the work of Ms. Karen Johnston of Seattle

  and used by permission.